Bits: Everything Sucks Edition

-The bailout approved by Congress last week appears to have done little in the short term to stop the current worldwide financial spiral, though expecting it to have done so may have been unreasonable. Stock markets around the world went sharply downhill Monday. In the US, the Dow Jones dropped below 10000 for the first time in years. In Iceland, the currency was down 7% and the economy appears to be on the verge of collapse. The Frankfurt markets hit the skids after the German government had to perform its own bailout of real estate firms. Russian stock indexes lost over 15% of their value. And so on.

-Here you can find an easy step-by-step process to construct your own "Egg of Time." "Look into its time vortex, and see all that was, and all that will be." Yes.

-Time has a list of words the dictionary is trying to get rid of to make room for 2,000 new words. I am a word geek, and had not heard of any of these.

-New polls from various sources have shown Sen. Barack Obama up in pretty much every swing state, including Minnesota, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Florida, and New Mexico. However, it's still a month until the election, and we have discussed the accuracy of polls on here before.

-Meanwhile, Cracked.com has come up with a list of 5 presidential elections that were dumber than this one (somehow). It's actually a really good read. I particularly like the caption under the pic of John Quincy Adams: "I'll kill your wife. I don't even care."

-In response to what it says is widespread piracy, Warner Bros. is trying a new tack in Korea... it's going to start releasing its movies online before they hit DVD. How that will help, I'm not totally sure, but it makes sense in other ways.

-The Tampa Bay Rays are in baseball's final four. Hell has told us that it will take more than this for it to freeze over. Hell is just stubborn that way. In other sports news, the Ferocious Walruses fantasy football team remains undefeated. Because I know you've been hanging on every play.

Presidential Smackdown I

As I've said, I certainly don't want to make this blog exclusively political in nature, but it seemed necessary to at least post something about the first presidential debate, which too place earlier tonight in Oxford, Mississippi. I think that both Sen. McCain and Sen. Obama did their jobs well. They each framed their points the way they wanted to and neither came off as excessively unreasonable. I enjoyed this particular format because it allowed for real debate, a back-and-forth between the candidates, which moderator Jim Lehrer did a good job of encouraging. If debates are simply a series of questions posed to the individual candidates, then we get the same answers we get every day in stump speeches. But if they're talking to each other, than we often get genuinely new insights into the way these people think.

A few examples: Obama framed McCain's tax policy as "tax breaks for the wealthy." McCain argued that "reducing the business tax" would encourage businesses to flourish here in the US. I'm not sure I agree with McCain, but this was the first time I had actually heard him defend his position on this issue in a coherent way. He at least sounded like someone I could reason with. Alternatively, McCain challenged Obama on one of his pet issues, earmarks. Obama explained coherently why he believes that this is not the sole solution to our budgetary issues. He made McCain come across as a little crazy on the subject. McCain did his best to do the same to Obama on the issue of Iraq withdrawal, but American support for that action is so across-the-board that I don't know if he could succeed.

McCain consistently tried to frame the foriegn policy issue in terms of experience, a subject he returned to over and over. This is what he needs to do to Obama on that issue. Obama, alternatively, needs to present this election as one of the past versus the future, which as I have explained I think it very much is. I was most struck in that respect, unexpectedly, by the exchange concerning policy towards Russia. Obama chastised Russia for some of its recent actions, but warned against "returning to a Cold War mindset." McCain led off his opening statement on the question by saying, "I have looked into Vladimir Putin's eyes, and I saw three letters: K-G-B." Obama succeeded at very clearly making that a debate about past thinking versus moving forward into the future