Grab bag: Bailout edition

I think–I hope–Krugman nails it here. The Bush administration tried to slip a fast one by us, a last gift for his cronies. There are enough people who were paying attention that it slowed down. Now, with Bernie Sanders, we can ask, “We’ve been told…we can’t afford—that the government providing healthcare to all people is just unimaginable; it can’t be done. We don’t have the money to rebuild our infrastructure. We don’t have the money to wipe out poverty. We can’t do it. But all of a sudden, yeah, we do have $700 billion for a bailout of Wall Street.”

Great article by Steven Weinberg on the ongoing collision of religion and science.

The investor in me agrees with the administration’s request for full speed ahead on the mortgage bailout. The citizen in me says that should be “all deliberate haste” and particularly thinks that the request not to weigh down the leglislation with “provisions that would undermine” the bailout–i.e. provisions to ensure the money is spent correctly and that individual mortgage holders get some relief too–is disingenous at best, crap at worst.

Cisco buys Jabber; much concern about the future of Jabber as an open source platform. These guys were among the first to help leverage standard blogging APIs, so Mazel Tov.

An aircraft carrier, apparently built to minifig scale. We’re gonna need more gray pieces.