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rebecca will be spending nov. 4th driving democrats to polling stations in northern virginia.

stunning new detailed image revealed of an undecided voter's brain

microsoft - life without walls...

so did everyone get their friendly windows xp update?
















see below:

NOTICE: THIS UPDATE FROM MICROSOFT WILL HELP YOU KNOW IF YOU ARE RUNNING A PROPERLY LICENSED, GENUINE COPY OF WINDOWS XP. SOME UPDATES AND OFFERS FROM MICROSOFT REQUIRE A GENUINE COPY OF WINDOWS XP.

INSTALLING THIS UPDATE IS OPTIONAL. THE UPDATE WILL BECOME A PERMANENT PART OF YOUR WINDOWS XP SOFTWARE. AFTER INSTALLATION, FUTURE UPDATES TO THIS SUPPLEMENT WILL DOWNLOAD AND INSTALL ACCORDING TO YOUR AUTOMATIC UPDATES SETTINGS.

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BEFORE INSTALLING, PLEASE READ AND ACCEPT THE LICENSE TERMS BELOW.

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MICROSOFT SOFTWARE SUPPLEMENTAL LICENSE TERMS

MICROSOFT WINDOWS GENUINE ADVANTAGE NOTIFICATIONS FOR MICROSOFT WINDOWS XP

Microsoft Corporation (or based on where you live, one of its affiliates) licenses this supplement to you. The following license terms describe additional use terms for this supplement. These terms and the license terms for the software (Microsoft Windows XP) in your Windows XP End User License Agreement apply to your use of this supplement. If there is a conflict, these supplemental license terms apply.

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Sarah Palin - republican nightmare

ST. LOUIS — In her first policy speech of the presidential campaign, Gov. Sarah Palin vowed Friday that a McCain administration would allow all special-needs students the choice of attending private schools at public expense, a controversial and potentially costly proposal likely to be welcomed by many parents and bitterly opposed by many school districts.

…she omitted to say anything about the $22,500 her makeup stylist received from the RNC, or indeed anything about charging Alaskan rape victims for their own test kits.

Women for Sarah Palin? Which Ones?

Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin: under her mayoral leadership in Wasilla, Alaska, charged rape victims for their own rape kits.

A rape kit is a sexual assault forensic evidence kit, used to collect DNA that can be used in criminal proceedings to assist in the conviction of those who commit sex crimes. The kit is performed as soon as possible after a sexual assault or attack has been committed. It is usually humiliating and uncomfortable for the victim.

A $1,200 bill, just so that the criminal who assaulted you might be caught.

One of the services that almost every American can agree on is that our government should provide policing and investigation into crime, especially of a violent nature. Rape, one of the most difficult to prosecute, disproportionately affects young women.

Not only does she neglect to support women who were raped in getting the evidence they needed to get justice, but she doesn't believe they should have the right to choose what happens with their bodies after they've endured such violation.

…how very presidential.

all in god's hands

FINDLAY, Ohio



In an interview posted online Wednesday, Sarah Palin told Dr. James Dobson of “Focus on the Family” that she is confident God will do “the right thing for America” on Nov. 4.

Dobson asked the vice presidential hopeful if she is concerned about John McCain’s sagging poll numbers, but Palin stressed that she was “not discouraged at all.”

“To me, it motivates us, makes us work that much harder,” she told the influential Christian leader, whose radio show reaches millions of listeners daily. “And it also strengthens my faith because I know at the end of the day putting this in God’s hands, the right thing for America will be done, at the end of the day on Nov. 4.”

what like poverty, disease, & starvation?

...it also won't matter how people choose to vote.

sarah "joe six-pack" palin

hello christian freak, can you please get a few more giant american flags at your rallies...?

...oh, while you're at it a few more white people.

meanwhile...

The Anchorage Daily News writes: "Add up the couple's 2007 income and the estimated value of their property and investments and they appear to be worth at least $1.2 million."

...yes, i'm sure that relates very closely to hockey moms and joe six pack.

as the freak herself said "God's will has to be done in unifying people and companies to get that gas line built, so pray for that,"

pray to get a gas line built...obviously god saving the earth by helping man destroy it.

so i guess if obama wins, then god doesn't think too much of sarah palin or mccain?

i mean what better chance are they going to get to further the religious right?

joe (ke) the not-even registered to vote..not-licensed plumber.

and the best bit is that he owes Ohio back income taxes :)

so,

he's a plumber that has never taken an apprenticeship.

he's not licensed to be a plumber (that means he isn't one).

he's not even licensed to be a contractor.

he's not registered to vote.

...and he's obviously NOT getting ready to buy a business that nets more than $250k a year.

...oh, and his home telephone number is unlisted.

and this is what john mccain holds up as his blue-collar, best small business bet to attack barack obama's tax policy...

of course, we must not be too fast to judge someone who makes more than $250,000 a year.

(as a plumber).

congratulations, joe.

you are 'twat of the week.'

please sir, can i have another $37.8 billion?

just when will america recognize that this is the collapse of the deregulated, free market model?

the right wing pundits and conservative republicans - knocking government until it's time to bail out their flagship institutions with taxpayers' money.

can't have it both ways.


Remarks by Chairman Alan Greenspan
Corporate governance
At the 2003 Conference on Bank Structure and Competition, Chicago, Illinois
(via satellite)
May 8, 2003

Benefits of Derivatives

Although the benefits and costs of derivatives remain the subject of spirited debate, the performance of the economy and the financial system in recent years suggests that those benefits have materially exceeded the costs.

Over the past several years, the U.S. economy has proven remarkably resilient in the face of a series of severe shocks--the collapse of equity values, terrorist attacks, and geopolitical turmoil. To be sure, economic growth has been subpar for some time, but we seem to have experienced a significantly milder downturn than the long history of business cycles and the severity of the shocks to the economy would have led us to expect. Although no single factor can account for this resilience, one striking feature that differentiates this cycle from earlier ones is the continued vitality of most U.S. banks and nonbank financial institutions.

In past cycles, economic downturns often produced credit losses that were so severe that the capacity of those institutions to intermediate financial flows was impaired. As a consequence, recessions were prolonged and deepened. This time, the economic downturn has not significantly eroded the capital of most financial intermediaries, and the terms and availability of credit have not tightened to such an extent as to be significant factors in deepening the contraction or impeding the recovery. The use of a growing array of derivatives and the related application of more-sophisticated methods for measuring and managing risk are key factors underpinning the enhanced resilience of our largest financial intermediaries. Derivatives have permitted financial risks to be unbundled in ways that have facilitated both their measurement and their management.

Because risks can be unbundled, individual financial instruments now can be analyzed in terms of their common underlying risk factors, and risks can be managed on a portfolio basis. Concentrations of risk are more readily identified, and when such concentrations exceed the risk appetites of intermediaries, derivatives can be employed to transfer the underlying risks to other entities. As a result, not only have individual financial institutions become less vulnerable to shocks from underlying risk factors, but also the financial system as a whole has become more resilient.

Individual institutions’ portfolios have become better diversified. Furthermore, risk is more widely dispersed, both within the banking system and among other types of intermediaries and institutional investors. Even the largest corporate defaults in history (WorldCom and Enron) and the largest sovereign default in history (Argentina) have not significantly impaired the capital of any major financial intermediary. Likewise, record amounts of home mortgage refinancing and accompanying declines in mortgage asset durations have not imperiled the principal intermediaries in the mortgage markets, in substantial part because these institutions were able to use derivatives to transfer a significant portion of the convexity risk associated with prepayments of fixed-rate mortgages to investors in callable debt and issuers of putable debt.

Risks Associated with the Use of Derivatives
If derivatives and the techniques for risk measurement and management that they have facilitated have produced all these benefits, why do they remain so controversial? The answer is that the use of these instruments and the associated techniques pose a variety of challenges to risk managers. Inevitably, risk-management failures occur, and in two instances--the highly publicized cases of Barings and Long Term Capital Management--they proved destabilizing.

Those that question the net benefits of derivatives see daunting risk-management problems and thus foresee catastrophic outcomes. In particular, they fear that common deficiencies in risk management will result in widespread failures or that the failure of a very large derivatives participant will impose heavy credit losses on its counterparties and yield a chain of failures. Others, like myself, who see the benefits of derivatives exceeding the costs, do not deny that their use poses significant risk-management challenges. But we see ample evidence that the risks are manageable in principle and generally have been managed quite effectively in practice, at least to date. Indeed, credit losses on derivatives have occurred at a rate that is a small fraction, for example, of the loss rate on commercial and industrial loans.

Market discipline in the largely unregulated derivatives markets has provided strong incentives for effective risk management and has the potential to be even more effective in the future.

To be sure, there undoubtedly will be further risk-management failures. But the largest market participants have such diversified businesses that a risk-management failure involving a single product line is unlikely to be a threat to solvency. Furthermore, risk-management failures are more likely to be idiosyncratic than to reflect common deficiencies in procedure or technique among market participants. In the case of the management of market risk, our bank examiners observe significant differences in approach across the largest U.S. banks, even in the measurement of such a basic concept as value-at-risk.

On March 17, 2008 Alan Greenspan wrote an article for the Financial Times' Economists’ Forum entitled “We will never have a perfect model of risk“, in which he argued: “We will never be able to anticipate all discontinuities in financial markets.” He concluded: “It is important, indeed crucial, that any reforms in, and adjustments to, the structure of markets and regulation not inhibit our most reliable and effective safeguards against cumulative economic failure: market flexibility and open competition.

... i would have to disagree.

the global financial markets have ceased to function

george w. bush's final hurrah...

better vote mcpain if you've had a lobotomy, or would benefit from one...