Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Stuff below the fold

The FreeLibrary has a podcast by Kitty Kelly, about her Oprah biography.

Come on, now: just like the National Enquirer you'll read it, you just won't admit you read it...

they also have a podcast by Paul Davies on the search for ET...
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Adopt a child as a green political statement?

Attention CNN: Children are not things or pets. You adopt a child to have a child to raise, not to make a political statement.
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Catholic church statistics: 1.1 billion Catholics, 400 thousand priests...

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The NYTimes lists the bad guys of the financial crisis:

Yet, in the end, it comes down to this: Goldman Sachs, ACA Capital, IKB Deutsche Industriebank and even the rating agencies never had any duty to protect us from their greed. There was one entity that did — our government.

But it was the purported regulators, including the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Office of Thrift Supervision, that used their power not to protect, but rather to prevent predatory lending laws. The Federal Reserve, which could have cracked down on lending practices at any time, did next to nothing, thereby putting us at risk as both consumers and taxpayers. All of these regulators, along with the S.E.C., failed to look at the bad loans that were moving through the nation’s banking system, even though there were plentiful warnings about them.

More important, it was Congress that sat by idly as consumer advocates warned that people were getting loans they’d never be able to pay back. It was Congress that refused to regulate derivatives, despite ample evidence dating back to 1994 of the dangers they posed. It was Congress that repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated investment and commercial banking, yet failed to update the fraying regulatory system.

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