Saturday productivity

Here there is none... oh but there could be, if only I wasn't such a lazy butt.

Today is the day of the annual complex yard sale. Last years was a tad pathetic, I think there were maybe two people out there. Perhaps it's a sign of the economy but this year it's darn near packed. Cars coming and going, people milling about. I find myself wondering if maybe I shouldn't have put a little more thought into the process of deciding it wasn't worth the effort to participate.
Of course for that to do any good I'd have had to have things I wanted to try and sell. I really don't have that much in the way of "crap". The storage closet is full of holiday stuff not old useless stuff. The Kiddo hasn't outgrown much in the way of clothing (that we haven't already given away to DI). Granted I do have a few things here and there, but the 5 bucks total I'd have gotten out of them probably wouldn't have been worth getting up early for.

Still it's nice to see people being productive out there in the cold. Yes I said cold, the weather page says 71 degrees cloudy and windy but to me it feels a lot colder.

following the paper trail

I'm definitely not the most economically educated person out there and even I could have told you the bail out wouldn't do a whole lot of anything for awhile. I'm not saying it was or was not a good idea (I would have voted no, but that's because I'm a cynical gal and it torks me that I'm paying for that type of thing).

Any rate, via Fatale Abstraction, I followed a link to yet another article (this one from across the pond no less) ... as I read the thing one paragraph jumped out at me as I'd read something similar in several different places. (I dutifully highlighted the pertinent sentence for you if you don't feel like going to read the entire article. I'm just saying... ... ...

"It's true that the improvident lending was not initiated by Fannie and Freddie: their role in this was to buy these loans and sell them on – but then the music stopped. Cynical students of the American political system will note that the biggest recipient of campaign contributions from the munificent duo of Fannie and Freddie over the past 20 years was one Christopher Dodd, Democrat Chairman of the Senate's Banking Committee.

Rather surprisingly, given that he has only been in the Senate for four of those years, the second biggest beneficiary was Barack Obama. In August the Washington Post reported that Obama's presidential campaign team had sought the advice of Franklin Raines "on mortgage and housing policy matters". Perhaps Mr Obama's team just wanted to know where all the bodies are buried – there are rather a lot of them. "