More playing around with Blip.tv. Here’s a vid of us at Instructables going crazy on a little ski jump that we built:

And here’s a random car fire that we passed by on the way home. Skip to the end if you want the exciting part…

It appears that Hugo Chavez, through the Venezuelan government, has purchased Sequoia systems, a manufacturer of electronic voting machines used in 17 states and the District of Columbia. An investigation has been opened by Committee on Foreign Investment, and rightfully so.

Apparently, the idea that the owner of an e-voting software producer may influence the operation of their machines is not so “kook fringe” after all.

“It’s vile,” said Rep. Mark Foley, R-West Palm Beach. “It’s more sad than anything else, to see someone with such potential throw it all down the drain because of a sexual addiction.” On Bill Clinton - 1998

St. Petersburg Times. Published September 12, 1998

Two interesting pieces of housing and housing finance-related data reported today. First, 40% of houses sold nationwide last year were ’second’ homes: vacation (12%) or investment (28%). This is significant because in theory the owners of non-primary houses are more sensitive to fluctuations in market price, and more likely to cash out or at least stop buying when that price peaks.

The second piece of information sheds some light as to exactly how close to reality that theoretical prediction is. As it turns out, the bulk of profits (in one case 62%) reported by savings and loan banks in the past year is due to ‘noncash income from deferred interest.’ This is a polite way of saying that the banks are reporting profits on income that doesn’t actually exist. What they are doing is the following: Given a negatively amortizing loan, (one for which the principal balance increases over time because the minimum required monthly payment is below the amount necessary to service the interest) the banks are reporting as profit the additional deferred interest on the now increasing principal. In other words, they are claiming as income potential future payments from customers whose ability to pay is already at the absolute minimum, and whose debt obligation is steadily rising as a result. Throw in the continued upward march of interest rates (to which adjustable rate mortgages still have a couple of years to catch up) and, well…

So we’re left with banks whose income stream is primarily dependent on payments from real estate speculators who are banking on the value of their properties not just holding ground, but increasing faster than their interest can be recapitalized. Meaning if the prices don’t increase, they’ll have to foreclose to recoup their investment, and sell off the collateral at whatever price they can get.

And housing inventory is steadily rising.

tick, tock…

oh happy days..

please go to trial before november.

Election Update: Do-Over on First Ballot

Looks like the Republicans can’t even throw their internal elections without leaving fat fingerprints all over it.

This image is all over the blogoshpere (doesn’t the word ‘blogosphere’ sound like a hairball trying dislodge itself?!). Back to the photo, though. Is this really our tough-acting, non-girlie-man governator?

Okay. So the indictments were delivered today. Press conference on Thursday. “Rumors” of up to 5 indictments. Fitzgerald spotted at Rove’s lawyers office this afternoon.

You know what? I refuse to be excited.

I simply cannot suspend disbelief anymore when it comes to the shit sticking to this administration. It’s been five years of non-stop fuckery: police records, army records, using tragedy for propaganda, ruining the careers of respected statesmen, hiring convicted felons to manage a centralized database profiling every single american citizen, hiring convicted felons to manufacture evidence for war while spying for Iran, paying off journalists to spread that evidence, making up journalists to attack its doubters, flat-out incompetence up and down the line, flat-out lying over and over until the lies become just the other side of the story, putting our soldiers, our nation, and our founding ideals in the shithouse for some neo-fundamentalist principles cooked up because a Chicago professor couldn’t handle seeing the sexual imagery on TV that he could never get in the bedroom. I don’t even need to link to those stories, because they’ve all been so widely reported, double and quintuple sourced, that they have finally trepanated our unbearably thick collective skull. But it hasn’t changed a single thing.

I’ve done my best to take a long-term view of things. It’s been bad before, but what’s eight years? Well, to me these eight years are more than just a rough patch, more than just squandering what will be remembered as an historic opportunity, possibly the last. This experience has shown me over and over that despite the best efforts of some of our most brilliant and well-intentioned individuals, the media-pandering, on-message political machines will always win, must always win, because those are the rules of the game. The rules of their game.

So right now I am not only an empiricist, but I am a skeptical empiricist. I will not even believe it when I see it. I will not believe it until Karl Rove and Dick Cheney are in handcuffs and entering pleas. And even then I just won’t be sure.

Because though they may not own the prosecutor, or the grand jury, or the judge, they’ve got the executioner by the balls. You’ve already heard the memes hovering, probing the surface, waiting to be unleashed: “Making it a crime to be conservative.” “Two-bit prosecutor looking for a name.” “Perjury isn’t a real crime.” They sound absolutely ridiculous right now, right? Make no mistake, the Lutz’s and Rove’s and the Ailes’s of the world, these are true masters of their craft. Let them whisper in our broadcast ear. Let them repetition prime us a bit. Watch the tide turn back yet again.

Familiarity to bias becomes a bias of its own. Only the black swan can save us now.

CNN.com “A Texas court issued a warrant Wednesday for former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay to appear for booking, where he is likely to face the fingerprinting and photo mug shot he had hoped to avoid.”

One down…

PS: I’ll be reloading thesmokinggun.com about ten times an hour waiting for the mug shot to show up. Will post when it’s available.

Update 11:15pm 10/19/2005: Well, no mug shot yet, but here’s the arrest warrant to tide you over, courtesy of the Daily DeLay:

Update 12:07pm 10/20/2005: You know what? The DeLay mugshot is so disappointing, I’m just going to go ahead and pretend this is how it turned out instead. Here you go, the Representative from the 22nd Congressional District of Texas: