Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Sad day for every baseball lover

Harmon Killibrew has passed away after a 5-month battle with esophageal cancer. He's much loved here. A street near the Mall of America (built on the grounds of the old Met Stadium where Harmon played) is named for him. The grounds of the new stadium, Target Field, is home to statues of Twins greats, including Harmon.

Cancer, you suck extra badly this week.

The People vs. Goldman Sachs

The Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Carl Levin (D-Michigan) and Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma), recently released the results of their investigation into the financial crisis in a 650-page report, "Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse".

Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone, summarizes the report thusly:
Their unusually scathing bipartisan report also includes case studies of Washington Mutual and Deutsche Bank, providing a panoramic portrait of a bubble era that produced the most destructive crime spree in our history — "a million fraud cases a year" is how one former regulator puts it. But the mountain of evidence collected against Goldman by Levin's small, 15-desk office of investigators — details of gross, baldfaced fraud delivered up in such quantities as to almost serve as a kind of sarcastic challenge to the curiously impassive Justice Department — stands as the most important symbol of Wall Street's aristocratic impunity and prosecutorial immunity produced since the crash of 2008.

Sunday, May 15, 2011

Woo-hoo!

Best new of the weekend? Athens goes wettish. Beer and wine soon to be available in Athens. I suppose it's Athens' way of going green by cutting back on gasoline consumption.