Sunday, May 24, 2009

Great Moments in UW Class of 93 History

I was interested to find out the woman who broke the expense account scandal in the UK was a classmate of mine. Unfortunately, I didn't know her. Big school and all.

If the British tabloids knew about the sex-advice column Heather Brooke wrote for the University of Washington Daily nearly two decades ago they might run with it as a salacious news item.

Something like "sex writer rocks Parliament."

But that information hasn't reached them, it seems, and Brooke has proven to an entire nation she is a journalist of another ilk. In doing so, the former Seattleite has shaken up the British parliamentary leadership and perhaps changed forever the relationship between the British press and the House of Commons.

Thursday, May 14, 2009

No Kidding

In the bizarre beyond belief category, President Obama proposes the largest deficits, by far, in US history through massive spending increases, and then notes that they are a bad idea.

May 14 (Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama, calling current deficit spending
“unsustainable,” warned of skyrocketing interest rates for consumers if the U.S. continues to finance government by borrowing from other countries.

“We can’t keep on just borrowing from China,” Obama said at a town-hall meeting in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, outside Albuquerque. “We have to pay interest on that debt, and that means we are mortgaging our children’s future with more and more debt.”

Holders of U.S. debt will eventually “get tired” of buying it, causing interest rates on everything from auto loans to home mortgages to increase, Obama said. “It will have a dampening effect on our economy.”