NPCT

This is absolutely the best explanation of the credit crisis I have seen to date:
The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

The proposed bailout of the financial services sector is a “loan” of $700 billion. I put quotes around “loan” because the whole point is for the government to buy bad debt, so it’s really a handout. We all will buy our little share of these bad mortgages, regardless of whether we took out [...]

This Newseek article presents a fantastic case as to why Sarah Palin is actually a dangerous choice to govern the United States. The author goes on to discuss the bizarre situation in US politics where qualifications for office are actually a detriment:

Ask yourself: how has “elitism” become a bad word in American politics? There [...]

There is a great (although badly-drawn) cartoon here that explains very well how we got into this credit crunch.

This is a fantastic video from MSNBC where a journalist named Ari Melber destroys a McCain representative on a blatant misrepresentation that the campaign is attempting to make about Obama’s voting record.

Even though I often agree with them in principle, I pretty much ignore the Daily Kos people as being the Democrat equivalent of the Drudge Report and Rush Limbaugh. However, this post really spoke to me, and makes an observation that I have also been making: the Republicans just seem to want to slam [...]

I believe the original article is in Science, here.
The article is only available if you or your institution has an AAAS membership. This behavior seems a bit odd for a group calling it self an “Association for the Advancement of Science.”

There are good cops out there, but sometimes the news makes it seem like they’re all up to no good. Here’s a short video of a good cop doing his job well at a protest in LA. It seemed like it was worth sharing.

This is worth a read. It is an anonymous letter home from an officer in Iraq.

An interesting article here about Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) – a group of current and former police officers who advocate drug legalization. Worth a look. It’s good to see that there is at least a dialogue starting about ending the futile War on Drugs.

Cole, LEAP’s executive director, spent twelve years as an [...]

Great analysis of many hotly-contested congressional districts here.

It looks like electoral-vote.com is back up for the 2006 mid-term elections. It aggregates polling data to try to predict the outcome of the election if it were held today.

Stephen Colbert talks to Congressman Lynn Westmoreland about the Ten Commandments. Really funny and also sad.

There’s a great article at Slate on the realities of how Bush selects his appointees.

Bush’s stated management model—appointing good people, delegating authority to them, and holding them accountable for results—reflects some common-sense notions he picked up at Harvard Business School. His actual management practice, however, has not followed that model. In practice, Bush tends to [...]

So, Senate Republicans are hoping to give everyone $100 to help pay for gas. Do these guys know something I don’t? So, they’re going to give everyone $100, which will come from… taxes. But because of government waste, etc, that $100 paid in will really be more like $500. Everyone takes a [...]

According to this article on Slate, the redistricting effort in Texas led by Tom De Lay has resulted in the incumbent rewinning their seat 98% of the time.

“As a mapmaker, I can have more of an impact on an election than a campaign, than a candidate,” says Republican consultant David Winston, who drew House seats [...]

Check out this great Doonesbury cartoon on Slate.

I gave a talk on personal finance at Offtopic Lunch on Friday. The slides are here.

Today I found an interesting annotated history of world oil prices.