Very Local News

• Still haven't seen Wall-E (how ever it is spelled). I think Elle is off to see it today as a school outing. 2008-07-16.
  
• The financial institutions of the U. S. are off the deep end. Five Trillion ( 5,000,000,000,000 ) dollars worth of mortgage holdings are worthless because no one can prove they are worth the paper they are printed on. This is so big that Fanny May and Freddy Mac cannot be aloud to fail. They would take the rest of the economy with them down the crapper. In contrast, the Savings and Loan bail out in the eighties was around half a billion ( 500,000,000 ) dollars.
• GM says everything is great. No chance of going belly up any time soon. Just a few lay-offs/cut-backs/cost-cutting, then everything will turn around. That is all. ... Time to worry?
• Didn't Daimler buy Chrysler for the Jeep unit? The same Jeep unit that tanked with $3+ a gallon gas? Then Daimler dumped Chrysler like a flaming badger.
  
• A teacher in China blogged about leaving the school children to fend for themselves as he fled for his own safety during that big quake  a couple weeks ago. He is now called the most hated man in China. "I am not brave enough to risk my life for others." He was fired, not for leaving his kids, but for speaking on his blog about what happened. This is not the first job he has lost for speaking on 'taboo' issues. He is now suing in China to defend his freedom of speech. Sounds like a brave action to me. Other Chinese people say the school buildings falling apart was what killed children during the quake. This man is a scapegoat. Ironically, other bloggers in China chastise him for 'overexercising his freedom of speech.'
  
• The amount of swearing increases as quitting time approaches.
• If the Daily KOs and Code Pink joined up It would be the Daily Pinkos. Wait a minute. It is the Daily Pinkos already. I'll have to come up with a better one than that.
• Found a new add on for Firefox that allows you to switch scripting on and off per site. Nice. Been looking for this for a while.