I try to focus on the positive, because the negative sucks and it largely out of my control. Hey, Natalie Portman is single again! Arrested Development is gonna be made into a movie! Clay Aiken is gay?!! Say it ain’t so…

But reality is what it is, and right now it’s pretty ominous. So let’s poke fun at some things that make us angry,  eh?

Instead of suspending a campaign, [David] Letterman said, a presidential candidate should go to Washington to deal with a crisis and let his running mate shoulder the burdens of politicking….

…McCain told the CBS show that he was immediately flying back to Washington, Letterman told his audience. Then Letterman showed a TV feed of McCain being made-up for an appearance on news anchor Katie Couric’s “CBS Evening News.”

McCain has lost his mind.  And the trillions of votes he’ll receive in November (don’t kid yourself; even actions like these mean nothing in the hearts and minds of the braying sheep of America) tell me that maybe it’s time to move to a country where I have more in common with the populace. Further evidence?

McCain supporter Sen. Lindsey Graham tells CNN the McCain campaign is proposing to the Presidential Debate Commission and the Obama camp that if there’s no bailout deal by Friday, the first presidential debate should take the place of the VP debate, currently scheduled for next Thursday, October 2 in St. Louis.

In this scenario, the vice presidential debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin would be rescheduled for a date yet to be determined, and take place in Oxford, Mississippi, currently slated to be the site of the first presidential faceoff this Friday.

Graham says the McCain camp is well aware of the position of the Obama campaign and the debate commission that the debate should go on as planned — but both he and another senior McCain adviser insist the Republican nominee will not go to the debate Friday if there’s no deal on the bailout.

I love the smell of panic in the morning.  It smells like… victory.

No, sorry.  Some moron is burning the microwave popcorn.

Does no one else get a little nervous that one of the Keating Five is insisting on helping broker a 700 billion dollar transaction between the government and financial institutions?  Is it just me? It’s like sending his wife to help set the price on class 2 narcotic painkillers.

U.S. President George W. Bush, saying “our entire economy is in danger,” urged Congress to approve his administration’s $700 billion bailout proposal.

2008: The End of an Error.

Seriously, within the past month, I distinctly recall Bush saying that the economy was fine, that the foundations of our economy are strong, that there’s no reason to worry.  I’m glad that the puppet masters have finally started filling his scripts with some measure of the real world that the rest of us live in, but in my mind, it’s way too little, too late.

And waitaminute — this bailout is going to pay the CEOs of these firms that have lost so much money with poor planning and ethically dubious business practices?   FUCK YOU. I can’t possibly stress that enough, even with the blink tag.

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUCCKKKK YOU.

You know the rest of the world, if we fuck up and do our jobs poorly and risk devastating the entire economy?  We don’t get “golden parachutes” or “severance packages” or “the sympathy of politicians whose bathtubs we fill with hundred dollar bills so they can bathe in the green.”  We get shitcanned and have a really hard time finding another job — and rightfully so, because we’re not very good at that job, obviously duh you fucking morons. And if we cook up schemes to make millions of dollars, and those schemes collapse like a house of cards in a hurricane, and lots of people lose money because of us, we go to jail, and rightfully so, because we’re criminals and deserve to spend at least a day or two surrounded by people so poor that their resentment is all the foreplay we need for the rape we are about to receive.

At this point, I’m so tired of the lack of accountability and the displays of entitlement that I see everywhere — from Wall Street all the way down to Skid Row — that I’m ready to see these people face the consequences of their actions, even knowing full well that the rest of the country will have to suffer with them.  As a group, a society, a country, maybe it’s just that time — for all of us to accept (willing or not) that actions have reactions, and you can only delay them so long.

By the way, I’m not saying that the CEOs and other people involved the companies looking for a handout from the government are either crooks or incompetent. I — oh, wait.  I totally said that.

… in what may be a colossal case of coincidence (as much as it may be evidence of business as usual in the wonderful world of Republican politics), pay real special attention to the end of the video:

(CNN hates me and makes broken video embedders, so go to http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/business/2008/09/24/am.lawrence.savings.safety.net.cnn and watch the damn video.  Harumph.  Damn kids. via Constant Siege)

From Newsweek.com:

What is so unnerving about the candidacy of Sarah Palin is the degree to which she represents—and her supporters celebrate—the joyful marriage of confidence and ignorance. Watching her deny to Gibson that she had ever harbored the slightest doubt about her readiness to take command of the world’s only superpower, one got the feeling that Palin would gladly assume any responsibility on earth:

“Governor Palin, are you ready at this moment to perform surgery on this child’s brain?”

“Of course, Charlie. I have several boys of my own, and I’m an avid hunter.”

“But governor, this is neurosurgery, and you have no training as a surgeon of any kind.”

“That’s just the point, Charlie. The American people want change in how we make medical decisions in this country. And when faced with a challenge, you cannot blink.”

ANCHORAGE, Alaska – A campaign spokesman says Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin won’t speak with an investigator hired by lawmakers to look into the firing of her public safety commissioner.

So, really, can we just take all the politicians, run ’em through a polygraph with the singular question, “Does your office place you above the law?” (maybe with a follow-up of “Do you really think you’re better than all those you’ve sworn to represent?”), and shoot everyone who either answers truthfully in the positive or gets caught lying?

Then again, a bucket full of valid moral superiority still won’t trade for a gallon of gas.

Moving into new situations is a great source of anxiety to me, and I wonder often why I find myself doing so over and over and over again, ad nauseum.  I think I’ve finally realized, though, that the new situations are a little scary because of the lack of knowledge about the situation — and that’s also exactly why I seek out change, to continue learning, picking up new knowledge.

It explains a lot about a lot of my life, actually.  Why I get bored with people and hobbies.  Why I’ve changed jobs so many times in my life.  Why I’ve never focused on one thing, instead becoming the proverbial jack of all trades.

I’m addicted to knowledge.

When I had my experience with CIPD backin the fall of 2003, it was terrifying, mostly because I had no real idea what was going on.  Playing detective made me feel better — I thought it was because it was distracting me from the spreading numbness in my arms and legs, but I think now it was because I was absorbing all sorts of useless (and a little bit of useful) information.  Once they had figured out what was wrong with me, I recall (probably incorrectly — I have the memory of a broken plate) not worrying at all about having CIPD.  The prescribed treatment of Prednisone would either work or it wouldn’t (it did); whichever, I knew what was wrong, and I could move on to the next thing.

It’s not just book knowledge (although I did read the encyclopedias that my parents had when I was ten, A-Z, cover to cover) (yes, nerd).  It’s knowledge of all kinds and contexts — experiential, data, whatever.  Which, thankfully, keeps me from reading all of Wikipedia in my spare time.

Not really going anywhere with this, other than recording it for posterity.  More useless data out here on the brave new InterFrontier.