Wiretapping not focused on al Qaeda Suspects

Well, I'm not too good at blogging about what it is that I'm doing, so instead I'll bring some more politics to your attention. Remember when Bush said that all the wiretapping the NSA had been doing (think back to 2005 now) was strictly for use against al Qaeda suspects and that no American civil liberties would be violated?

Yeah, no surprise but that was a lie.

It seems wiretappers would intercept and then share some of the juicier tidbits coming out of Iraq, from military officers to volunteer relief workers (American Red Cross, for example). ABC just did a whole report on it, if you're following that.

Maybe next time I post it will be about something cool and science-y instead of depressing and politic-y. At least it's not mavericky.

Seasons of Love

Five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes in a year. Or roughly that. If you take into account leap years, there are 525,966 minutes in each year. So if you approximate that there have been 2007.75 years since say... Christ was born if you're into that kind of thing. If not you could just say it's been that many years since a carpenter dude became the ultimate super star. So, if you decided to take our economic stimulus package worth $700,000,000,000 and divided it by the number of minutes in those few years you would get a handy $662.87 per minute. That's not an awful hourly wage I'd take $39,772.20 an hour. A slight step up from my current wages. Honestly though, if they do ever pass the money I'm hiring a lobbyist. Just think I could ask for a paltry 0.0000142857% of the package for good Samaritan purposes. I could find some great things to do for the economy with $100,000.00. I'd promise to spend it on something like housing.

Not a political blog, but...

So, I haven't ever really posted here, but I thought some people might be interested in alternative bailout proposals since the bigg'un failed today.

If you're interested, this post on Daily Kos has some alternative takes from other sources, specifically mentioning previous banking crises in the past, and how those crises were averted.