Trent Lott is resigning from the Senate at the end of this year, but the timing will be negotiated with the governor of Mississippi to avoid a 90 day special election and allow for an interim appointment by the governor [another Repub] and the election to take place on Election Day, 2008. The Washington Post has multiple updates on its resignation article explaining what is going on with the seat.

There is a lot of speculation as to the reason for this sudden announcement, but it may not be so sudden. Lott wasn’t all that thrilled about running again in 2006, but did so because of the argument that he would be more effective in getting aid for Mississippi after Katrina as a senior Senator, than any new Senator could possibly be. Of course, when the Repubs lost their majority in the Senate, his influence was diminished, and 2008 looks to be even worse with all of the other resignations.

He might be resigning to go into lobbying, or because there is some scandal brewing, but it may just be that he’s tired of the whole mess.

The BBC delves into another facet of the financial problem: Mathematicians’ role in market mayhem

The financial markets are increasingly dominated by a new breed of highly mathematical traders, known as quantitative analysts or “quants”.

Whilst some celebrate the fact that empirical techniques are now applied to trading, others blame the quants for the current credit squeeze.
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Because the current US economic problems have global implications, the BBC has The US sub-prime crisis in graphics, which is a decent, if simplified, explanation of what has been going on the US mortgage market, and why it’s a mess.

The Dow is down a couple of hundred points again today, and this thing is not even close to over. The worst is, indeed, yet to come, and a major British bank is up for sale, while a major German bank may soon be because they invested in the US mortgage bonds.

Frankly at this point I think the Republicans are hoping for a recession, as it is very possible that the mortgage gamblers may have ignited a total collapse and a Depression. Every time the government let’s these people off the leash they crap in middle of the living room. They can’t be trusted without regulation, because they will engage in this destructive behavior every time you leave them unattended. They don’t learn. They aren’t trainable. They need keepers.

Logan Murphy at Crooks and Liars reports on it as Pentagon Leaves 20,000 Soldiers With Brain Injuries Off Official Wounded List, but that isn’t the story from a vet’s perspective.

First off, the Pentagon may not be trying to hide anything. The military has a peculiar, to those not in the military, way of accounting for injury, illness and death: it is by major command area. Any incident is assigned to the accounting area of the medical facility that reports the incident, not the area where it happened, and this is always the way the military has done it.

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