A mile a minute, that's me

More thoughts on recent news and happenings:

• My favorite radical feminist blogger responds to the Spitzer case and the media's [unsurprising] misogynist reporting . She says,

"I don’t know anything about “Kristen”, except that as a prostituted woman — however “high class” or “expensive” — she is a de facto sub-human. As are the millions of other, more invisible prostituted women she so inaccurately represents in the popular imagination. “Kristen” may achieve a kind of kitschy, pop-culture cachet because of the high status and celebrity of the asshole who used her as a meatsock, and she might be able to parlay her position as a footnote to history into some kind of financial reward — such things are not unheard of — but the vast majority of what so many progressives like to call “sex workers” subsist much, much more precariously. Some merely teeter on the precipice of indenture and some are genuinely enslaved, but all are subject to violence, disease, imprisonment, marginalization, shame, and all the other degradations, large and small, that accrue with membership in the planet’s most despised class."

Wow.

• Yes, the U.S. economy is indeed in the shitter. It was only so long before the effects of an overblown housing market could be staved off with tiny interest rate cuts and carefully worded statements from "important officials." Larry Elliott at The Guardian says,

"Bear Stearns marks the moment when the global financial crisis went critical. Up until last Friday, it had been possible - just about - to believe that the worst was over and that things were about to get better. That pretence was stripped away when JP Morgan, at the behest of the Federal Reserve, stepped in when the hedge funds pulled the plug on the fifth-biggest US investment bank." "Having allowed the housing boom to rage out of control for too long and then delaying cuts in interest rates until the housing market was gripped by recessionary forces, the Fed is now trying to make up for lost time with a burst of hyperactivity."

Kinda makes me glad I'm too poor to have given in to my home ownership lust. I'd probably be one of those suckers with an exploding adjustable rate mortgage facing foreclosure and a brand new set of ulcers.