1) The public transit trains are carpeted. This just strikes me as an excruciatingly bad idea. Any public transportation vessel should be fully ready to be hosed down because the need will arise.
2) The train stations were apparently designed by the set designers who put Logan's Run together.
3) As I was looking for a place to hang out, preferably with wifi, I started noticing a lot of Abraham Lincoln themed gift shops. Why? I just happened to be accidentally wandering by Ford's Theater. Chicago's a place where people get excited when they see that guy from Wilco in the street, and they only line up to take photos of The Bean. Haplessly ending up at the place where the man who ended slavery in America was shot is on a different scale.
4) I'm in a Starbucks, and I'm the only one in it with a Macbook. I didn't think Starbucks was allowed to open in the morning unless they had a customer ready with a Macbook.
In other news!
- I have learned today, much to my chagrin, that the world will not be ending this year. Much to the surprise of no one but myself, the Chicago "best record in baseball" Cubs have been eliminated from the playoffs in the first round and will not be winning the World Series for the first time in a century.
- Harold Meyerson has an interesting column today in the Post about presidential guilt-by-association and suggests that perhaps John McCain's current association with former Senator Phil Gramm might be a lot more nationally toxic than Obama's former association with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.
Gramm was always Wall Street's man in the Senate. As chairman of the Senate Banking Committee during the Clinton administration, he consistently underfunded the Securities and Exchange Commission and kept it from stopping accounting firms from auditing corporations with which they had conflicts of interest. Gramm's piece de resistance came on Dec. 15, 2000, when he slipped into an omnibus spending bill a provision called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA), which prohibited any governmental regulation of credit default swaps, those insurance policies covering losses on securities in the event they went belly up. As the housing bubble ballooned, the face value of those swaps rose to a tidy $62 trillion. And as the housing bubble burst, those swaps became a massive pile of worthless paper, because no government agency had required the banks to set aside money to back them up.
Meyerson also notes that McCain has done little to stifle rumors that Gramm would be a strong runner in a McCain presidency for Secretary of the Treasury. That alone should be cause for Obama to take the election in a landslide, but I don't think they're reading this in Texas. If I'm wrong... hi, Texas! - Afghan President Karzai is now facing accusations that his brother is involved with the heroin trade. I'm actually surprised that we haven't heard more about the opium business since the invasion in 2001. It spiked downward at the time, but it's up to record highs again. It wouldn't be surprising, since opium represents 11.4% of Afghanistan's GDP ($4 billion a year, out of a $35 billion GDP), but it wouldn't really be anyone's favorite thing to find out that the brother of the man who the U.S. installed as the democratically elected president is involved in the business that's fueling the Taliban insurgents that are currently killing underfunded, understaffed, and underequipped American troops.
- I'm delighted to say that there's a chance that Saxby Chambliss might be losing his seat this year. Most of you will remember Chambliss (R-GA) as the morally bankrupt dickweed with the gall to campaign, six years ago, by suggesting that his opponent, Max Cleland, who had lost three limbs in Vietnam, was a terrorist sympathizer. Chambliss' campaign was perhaps the most grotesque example of electoral politics in the era of Karl Rove, and I don't think anyone reading this will be sad to see him go.
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