Once signed into law, Treasury would begin a process to determine the assets it will buy and the manner it will set a price. Like everything in government, this is a moment that is lobby-able. Expect swarms of financial services lobbyists, investor groups, housing advocates, and others to try to game the system for their individual clients or members.If you don't believe we're on the path to the mother of all special interest feeding frenzies, think about this. In the midst of what our political leaders claim is the greatest economic crisis to face America since the Great Depression, a situation so dire as to require unprecedented urgent and bipartisan legislative action on massive scale, Senators could simply not restrain themselves, adding $150 billion of pork to the bailout bill.
But it was still reasonable exercise since we walked for two and a half hours and covered 5.71 miles.
It's interesting for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I'm not in Germany. I'm actually in London (Heathrow airport) on my way to Dublin. I am using a T-Mobile hotspot to access the internet so it must be routed through Germany. You'd think they'd use IP filtering to work out my location though, like this example I blogged a while back.
Here's her new phone obtained last week at net cost of, well nothing ($20 with a $20 call credit).
What's my point? Well look at them side by side; the new phone is tiny in comparison.
Viewing the body was harrowing but necessary to help us accept that he really is gone and burying my father-in-law alongside his parents in the family crypt was very emotional. So this was definitely the hardest day.
On Thursday the family continued receiving condolences in the salon attached to the church. The process consisted of us sitting in this large room from 10 am to 7 pm, standing to receive visitors and shaking their hands or kissing them on the cheeks (three times).
The visitors would then sit for some period of time (I'm sure the duration of their stay was carefully calculated according to some protocol but I didn't manage to figure out the algorithm) before repeating the process on their way out. This is quite a Middle Eastern thing to do. You'll often see photos of Arab political meetings where everyone is sitting around a room like this.
The process was repeated on Friday in a downtown location where fewer family and more political leaders visited. So I've now shaken the hands and kissed the cheeks of a sufficient proportion of Beirut's residents that I feel ready to run for a seat in the Lebanese parliament.
I always knew that my father-in-law was a man of some prominence in Beirut but I hadn't really appreciated how widely he was known and respected in the local community and in political and business circles.
I also knew that he'd maintained good relations with the Shiite community which is notable enough in a country renown for sectarian strife, but they really went out of their way to pay him respect; hanging banners farewelling him in the street; Shiite leaders coming to pay their condolences; and the overwhelmingly Shiite residents lining the streets and the Shiite shopkeepers closing their stores as the coffin was carried from the church to the cemetery.
