Mikulski on Paulson's Cash for Trash

Promising text from an e-mail I received from Sen. Mikulski's office this afternoon: "Congress must act promptly to restore confidence and stability in the economy. But I will not be stampeded into voting for the Bush Administration bill. During the last seven years, every time there's a crisis, they generate fear and they generate bad ideas. This three-page bill gives the Secretary of the Treasury unlimited power to intervene in our financial markets without any review by Congress, agencies, or courts. It cannot be rubber stamped by the Congress."

$700G Bailout

Secretary Hank Paulson's Cash for Trash Scheme.

1. From Tom Schaller, political science professor at UMBC, a Baltimore Sun editorial on liberal vs. conservative takes on government assistance, socialism, etc.
2. Lauren Weinstein's take on the mess.
3. From the Daily Kos: The Biggest Heist in World History

GNU Emacs: making the obvious difficult

Off and on it's really irritated me that someone on the GNU team decided to change the default behavior of tab in fundamental mode from insert ^i to indent-relative. I hate indent-relative. It makes lining things up in columns in text files difficult. So every few months I do a Google search, find other people making the same complaint, and see less than helpful suggestions. Tonight I got more frustrated than usual, and so spent more time than usual. It appears that the following shuts off indent-relative for the most part without messing up filename completion or indentation in various modes, e.g., java or html.

(setq default-major-mode 'text-mode)
(define-key text-mode-map "\t" "\C-q\C-i")

The above is pretty much alpha code at the moment. There's detritus in my .emacs that suggests that years ago I didn't like text mode for pnews or mail modes, but those are no longer issues. indent-relative is, IMHO, evidence of word processor-oriented thought processes, not text editor-oriented processes. As Linux grows to be more Windows like (e.g., bloated and buggy), there seems to be an undercurrent of making basic tools, e.g., emacs and wc, less Unix-like.