More on the Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac problem

This will probably get your blood pressure up, watching our politicians in 2004 defend the practices (which auditors and regulators said were egregious at the the time) of two companies that will be consuming more of our taxpayer dollars.

What caused the current mess?

Debatable, for sure, but I love Jim DeMint's presentation. This should be used in business school classes.

WaMu collapse doesn't surprise me

They way they treated me, the way they made stupid business decisions (I watched this first hand), I took my money out of there six months ago and switched banks.

Their failure doesn't surprise me, and its a function of bad decisions. Capitalism at its best, it weeds out poorly performing entities. Let someone who knows what they are doing step in.

Time for another picture update

Misc. pics over the last month or so.


Spencer on his way to first day of second grade.

Crazy Garrett at Green Lake, hanging on to the merry-go-round as it spins.

Garrett and I on a walk, in a meadow near Mount Si

Garrett spotting a cache on the Iron Horse Trail near Snoqualmie Tunnel

Spencer getting the hang of soccer and finding himself around the ball more often.

Spencer during warmups, while I marvel at what constitutes a straight line in this town.

Yes, we let our kids play on train tracks.

Taking a rest near Mount Rainier. Love Garrett's "Indiana Jones" hat, as he calls it.

Spencer reading to Garrett during our nightly storytime.

Spencer and I atop Little Si

Spencer and I did a little bonding this morning and took on Little Si, a 5 mile roundtrip hike that takes you 1000 feet up to views of Snoqualmie Valley. Spencer was able to do it in less than 90 minutes, which I thought was pretty good. We hit the trail early, hung out at the top for a while, did some caching, and were home by 11am. He said he'd do it again, so despite his blisters he must have had a good time hanging out with his ol' man.


Spencer found a hiking stick right away and proceeded to show me how Yoda walks with it.

Time to pull Culpepper out of retirement

Sorry, Kitna, this one was all set up for you to deliver on, and when the chips were down you folded three hands in a row, costing your team 21 easy points.

Who's next in the joke that is the Detroit Lions QB ferris wheel? Orlovsky doesn't exactly scream potential to me.

That was painful, I think

So Purdue lost in double OT to Oregon. Interesting. Interesting because my DVR recording stopped at 1:08 left to go in regulation. Talk about a pet peeve of mine. At least NFL Sunday Ticket allocates four and a half hours to their game slots.

For Purdue to be up 20-3 early in the second quarter and not be able to muster more than 3 points the rest of regulation is a shame. Then again, long stretches of scoring droughts (or even moving the ball droughts) has been a hallmark of Purdue since Brees left, and part of the reason I am excited about getting fresh blood in the coaching ranks next year (although I was hoping some of Danny Hope would start rubbing off this year). Will be nice to watch Purdue run more than 4 different plays on offense. At least I hope they do.

Could be a long year. Glad I didn't stay home to watch this one real-time.

Glad others saved me the time

After watching the Palin interviews I was left scratching my head wondering if ABC and Gibson took a similar approach with Obama. After all, I don't recall seeing anyone in the mainstream media other than FoxNews examining Obama's relationship with domestic terrorist William Ayers. Or his relationship with Tony Rezko. Or asking whether he felt experienced enough for the Presidency.

Sure enough, some people have done the deep digging and analyzed the two interviews. The differences between the questions and what was edited out are, well, interesting to say the least. Funny how some reporters believe the VP needs to have more experience than the President.

This is what I think is great about the web. 20 years ago this type of analysis is not available to the common folk. But tools like youtube and free blogs make this kind of dissemination of analysis trivial.

And just like with the media's treatment of Hillary, I don't think this is chauvinism or sexism. It's just the media's attempt to push their agenda forward. We'll see if it works better this election than it did in 2000 or 2004.

Spencer gets his brown stripe belt

One notch away from a red belt. This was pretty impressive as this form is a tough one to learn and most students do not pick it up in two months. And given a couple weeks out due to vacations in this last cycle, and I'm proud that Spencer worked hard and focused and got his brown stripe. The instructor was even having Spencer demo the form and moves for the class. He's come a long way and to watch the growth is amazing.

The first few pics are Spencer with one of the Black Belt instructors, who saw Spencer practicing on his own and stepped in to give Spencer some direction. I like this set.












And here's Spencer practicing his "Seig Heil Obama" salute.


Catching the board right as it breaks. Kewl.


Uh, don't ask me what this is about

Never Forget

More evidence that Sarah Palin CAN cause change!

Here we have an article by a mainstream media outlet actually reporting FACTS about a Republican.

Now THAT'S change! :)

When someone in the mainstream media reports on Palin's and Obama's record and experience side-by-side, I think we will term that a revolution. Although I guess its no secret Palin has the stronger resume.

If you believe EVERYONE has the right to vote...

... you need to watch this.

I rest my case.

Rumors on the Ridge (IGA)

So the IGA, the only grocery store on Snoqualmie Ridge, finally closed up shop after two years in business. Case study for MBA students: high prices and poor selection is not a profitable way to run a grocery store especially when there is plenty of competition. The grocery store in Snoqualmie remodeled recently and is enjoying excellent success.

Rumor has it that a new owner has been identified and it will take three months to get the new store up and running. No idea whether the new owners will be a QFC or Safeway (hopefully one of them). My guess is that the lack of stock the last couple months has been part of a plan to liquidate inventory and that a plan has been in the works for a while to find new owners. Hopefully the new owners can take advantage of a captive market in their backyard.

Wonder why the government isn't looking at bailing them out? You mean this is the way its supposed to work? Good businesses stay in business and bad businesses go out of business? You mean I don't have to fork over tax dollars to pay for bad business decisions of others? Wow, what a concept.

I no longer fear the Obamunists...

... as apparently we are too far down the path of socialism and dependency to reverse it.

Enough is enough.

I forked over $2000 to bail out Bear Stearns.

Then Congress talked about me forking over $500 to bail out the Big Three failures.

Now I will have to cough up $14,000 to help our government cover the losses from Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Wow, and they do that with a straight face?

What logic is there is taking money from people who are responsible and create value and giving it to those that destroy value? Let the companies who can't make it die. There are plenty of successful companies that know what they are doing that need help and are hiring. If you're going to take my money, please put it to good use. Bailing out incompetent companies hardly qualifies.

Enough is enough.

And I guess McCain is Bush's third-term - both sure have a penchant for big government.

Mount Si redux

On my first trek up Mount Si I was rewarded with clouds, clouds, clouds. I wanted to hit it again this year when I could enjoy the views, and today was the day. All the details here.

Apparently a mountain lion was up here Thursday. Better get to REI and pick up that knife I've been talking about.

Barry Sanders returning to the Detroit Lions?

story here

You go Megyn Kelly

Watch this undressing of the US Magazine editor. Awesome.

"We didn't have time to research." No kidding, jerkoff. I can't believe he was stupid enough to walk into an interview with Kelly.

I learned a long time ago that women can make me (as a man) look really, really stupid, and it doesn't take much effort on their part to do so. Studies show that on average women are smarter than men. Hence I have learned to leave my mouth shut most of the time (or head off to hang out with male friends instead of setting myself up). Perhaps the men in the media need to take heed before they find themselves out of jobs in the next few weeks.

Washingtonians embracing conceal-carry

Found an article on John Lott's blog reporting on the status of conceal carry in the state of Washington. 5% seems like a pretty high number, although I would like to see it even higher (50% sounds right to me).

Better get your gun now while the 2nd Amendment is still intact (that is, before Obama is elected).

Google taking on Microsoft in browser game

Google is confirming today that they will launch Chrome, a web browser. It will be available on Tuesday, and the blog post didn't mention any features. Hopefully they bring the same common sense innovation in Google Calendar and GMail to the browser. I'm looking forward to giving it a spin. I imagine the integrated search experience will be outstanding, and would not surprise me to see sponsored links in the browser itself (as opposed to just the pages). A tightly integrated Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Reader, and browsing experience would be outstanding.

Wondering if it will run on Max OS X? Anything to replace the crappy Safari and slow Firefox versions on it.