President bush decided to suspend his presidency early this morning citing that he didn’t want to ruin anything else in his last few months.

True story…developing.

I’ve been out of the loop the last day and have only seen clips of Letterman being stood up. 9 minutes of fun…

Amy, thank you.

I refreshed my browser that was pointed at Bloomberg.com to make sure I wasn’t seeing things before visiting a handful of other sites to confirm that senile mccain seriously suspended his campaign. Is he kidding?

No matter what “crisis” occurs, neither candidate should suspend their campaign during this democratic process of selecting a president. This is a presidential general election – not a sporting event. What is the mccain camp thinking?

Sort of boring but conducive to people watching. Some of the passengers are interesting to say the least.

http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0908/Biden_garbles_Depression_history.html

In the above link, Ben Smith reports that Katie Couric and Joe Biden were talking about the leadership the White House must show when markets are in turmoil. Hey Ben, actually watch the interview – I wouldn’t trust you to order a pizza.

1) Unlike what Smith “reported.” White House leadership was never mentioned during the aired interview with Couric.

2) FDR was the governor of New York during the 1929 crash. This said, like New York Governor Paterson this time around, FDR got on the airwaves and showed great leadership.

3) Ben Smith is an idiot…

You can skip forward to the 1:45 minute mark to see the “gaffe” in question…

P.S. Biden did misspeak – the television didn’t exist in 1929. One should assume he meant radio since FDR was a presence on the radio airwaves during the Wall Street crash.

The general election should OFFICIALLY end once this hits the nightly news tonight. Regardless, it will be interesting to see how these rat bastards try to squirm themselves out of this lie…

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26859857

“One of the giant mortgage companies at the heart of the credit crisis paid $15,000 a month to a firm owned by Senator John McCain’s campaign manager from the end of 2005 through last month, according to two people with direct knowledge of the arrangement.

The disclosure contradicts a statement Sunday night by Mr. McCain that the campaign manager, Rick Davis, had no involvement with the company for the last several years. Mr. Davis’s firm received the payments from the company, Freddie Mac, until it was taken over by the government this month along with Fannie Mae, the other big mortgage lender whose deteriorating finances helped precipitate the cascading problems on Wall Street, the people said.”

Damnit, I wish I could shake Marcy Kaptur’s hand – well done!

Republican Senator Jim Bunning from Kentucky just asked paulson during the Senate Banking Committee meeting, “Why is the government bailout going to include student loan and credit card debt?  How does that fix the housing problem?”

Good question.  paulson danced around, stumbled about 300 times, and finally sort of admitted he didn’t have an answer.  No joke – it was REALLY embarrassing to watch.  He sounded no smarter than bush and that’s scary seeing that paulson is heading up this $700 billion bailout that seemingly hasn’t been well thought out.

I’m never tuning into CNBC via the Slingbox during my lunch hour again. I will try to find a video tomorrow on youtube so y’all can see how bad things have gotten.

Update: http://www.forbes.com/business/2008/09/23/congress-paulson-congress-biz-beltway-cx_jz_0923pinata.html

As seen in the above link, Senator Bunning went on to say…

“The Paulson plan will not fix [these] problems; the Paulson plan will not help struggling homeowners.” Bunning continued, saying the bailout out would do nothing but “prop up and clean up the balance sheets of Wall Street. It is a financial socialism and it’s un-American.”

It’s common knowledge that Microsoft Live Search blows/way underperforms.  As mentioned originally on BccList.com here, it will be interesting to see what happens to the world of online advertising if Microsoft ever delivers a somewhat decent search engine product.

In the interim, check out the differences between the mainpages (google.com/msn.com) of each search engine yesterday as they were collectively ringing in the fall season with a leaf.

Good Enough of a Leaf:

Embarrassing/Lame Attempt at a Leaf on MSN.com:

P.S.  Live.com is usually aesthetically pleasing but nobody goes there.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a42969f2-88e1-11dd-a179-0000779fd18c.html

The interest rate thankfully wasn’t slashed last week by the Fed. Demand of oil is down. Supply was only slightly cut the last time OPEC met. But, the price rose $25 a barrel yesterday. What the fck is going on? I’m not joking – there needs to be an investigation into market manipulation.

You’ve probably been forced out of your $95 (or so) short position by yesterday’s rise in price. If you weren’t, stay in the position – this price spike on 9/22 is unexplainable and should drop soon enough though I guess you can never tell.

The only thing I can imagine causing the recent oil price increase is the fact that nobody is trading in a stock market that can’t be shorted. Commodity and oil prices may be extra volatile for another 8-9 days – stock market trading will remain meaningless until the short ban on financial shares ends October 2nd. On that note, could October 3rd be known as Black Friday since traders are dying to get back into the market and short the bejesus out of worthless financial shares trading too high like Goldman Sachs?

Update: As of 9/23 at 12 pm CDT, the price slid back to a more realistic number of $105 a barrel during trading today.  Somebody start the above mentioned investigation IMMEDIATELY.

http://www.gaywired.com/Article.cfm?ID=20400

Hear me out…

I’m down with mark buse – mccain’s chief of staff – reportedly being gay.  This said, feel free to hold off on the “you’re homophobic/a hypocrite/etc.” comment.

I only post the blog entry because it will be interesting to see how mccain’s religious right reacts.  I assume not so well.  Will mark buse be out of a job with this revelation being made public?  If so, is that discrimination?  Ouch – stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Jason, thank you.

The fun begins at the 14 second mark.

“Of course, it’s a fungible commodity and they don’t flag, you know, the molecules, where it’s going and where it’s not. But in the sense of the Congress today, they know that there are very, very hungry domestic markets that need that oil first. So, I believe that what Congress is going to do, also, is not to allow the export bans to such a degree that it’s Americans who get stuck holding the bag without the energy source that is produced here, pumped here. It’s got to flow into our domestic markets first.”

Bob Cesca’s Goddamn Awesome Blog, thank you.