I’m not reasoned and impartial about this Randian idiot who was a major factor in the mess that is the current US economy.

The Houston Chronicle tells us that Greenspan questions McCain’s tax cut proposal

WASHINGTON — Alan Greenspan says the country can’t afford tax cuts of the magnitude proposed by Republican presidential contender John McCain — at least not without a corresponding reduction in government spending.

“Unless we cut spending, no,” the former Federal Reserve chairman said Friday when asked McCain’s proposed tax cuts, pegged in some estimates at $3.3 trillion.

“I’m not in favor of financing tax cuts with borrowed money,” Greenspan said during an interview with Bloomberg Television. “I always have tied tax cuts to spending.”

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When they said weeks, they weren’t kidding.

Market Watch has an article on Entergy power restoration status

Work continues to repair damage from Hurricane Gustav. As of 4 p.m. Monday, crews had restored power to 99 percent of the affected customers in Louisiana. Remaining damage to the transmission system from Gustav includes 15 lines and seven substations out of service.

That’s in addition to everything that happened during Hurricane Ike.

You can track the status of friends and relatives in the service area at the Entergy Storm Center.

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The Miami Herald reports that Florida pension fund, Citizens hold Lehman securities

The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, a prestigious Wall Street firm, will touch Florida’s pension funds and the state-run insurer because both hold its securities.

The State Board of Administration holds $322 million in Lehman stock and bonds. The SBA manages the state’s employee fund and more than two dozen other funds, including assets for the Florida Hurricane Catastrophe Fund and the Florida Prepaid College Plan.

Dennis MacKee, a spokesman for the SBA, said the agency has an $84 million unrealized loss on its holdings.

Can you say “John Ellis ‘JEB’ Bush”? I thought you could.

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[Music video links] How about some Beatles: Money and I’m A Loser, which results in a stop by NOLA for Fats Domino’s Blue Monday followed by Marianne Faithful’s As Tears Go By and ends with understanding of Pink Floyd’s version of Money.

Update: I note with personal sadness that Pink Floyd keyboardist Richard Wright has died after a long battle with cancer.

Oh, yes, the Dow dropped 504 points today.

The aftermath of Hurricane Ike on the Gulf Coast, the flooding in the Midwest, the meltdown on Wall Street, two wars in progress, a Presidential campaign…so what was the lead story on CNN at noon – some old football player is on trial.

Who in hell cares about that? Why would anyone put that on their “front page”?

Hidden in the middle of this CBS report is what everyone on the Coast already knew: oil platforms and pipelines were damaged by Ike’s passage through the Northwestern Gulf of Mexico. While they don’t specifically say it, some oil had to leak out.

I’ve already seen reports from Houston that storage tanks have ruptured spilling fuel in the water, and there was a chlorine gas leak at one of the chemical plants. There’s no point in talking about moving the facilities, because no one wants them, even if the corporations were willing to spend the money on a relocation. Anyone who brings it up had better be ready to accept these plants in their “backyard” and be willing to fight to move them there.

The answer is alternative energy sources, not shuffling the pieces on the chess board.  These are problems associated with the petroleum industry, and they aren’t going away.  The only way of “fixing” them is by reducing the depency on oil, not just foreign oil, but all oil.

So, while the Shrubbery is interfering with search and recovery operations in Houston so he can pretend he cares and show up for photo ops with first responders the second in the line to the British throne is planning on doing something useful.

The BBC reports William to train as rescue pilot

Prince William is to train as a full-time pilot with the RAF Search and Rescue Force, Clarence House has said.

William, who learned to fly with the RAF earlier this year, said he wanted to “serve operationally”.

The prince is an officer in the Household Cavalry Regiment and has also spent time with the Navy and Army.

He said he wanted to build on his experience “especially because, for good reasons, I was not able to deploy to Afghanistan this year”.

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My host is still under a distributed denial of service [DDOS] attack, so the site may be slow to respond.

The tactics have altered and the techs are altering their response to counter. This is wasting a lot of resources on the Internet, and it is hoped that it can be backtraced so someone can spend some time “turning big ones into little ones” while contemplating the errors of their ways.

The techs have found a “silver lining” as this massive overload as revealed bottlenecks in the system that can only be seen under massive loads and will be able to fine tune performance after this is over.

I appreciate your patience. There’s not much you can do about jerks on the Internet.