InsidBlog.

By Philip Elliott, Jim Kuhnhenn
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Sunday, December 14, 2008

CHICAGO — President-elect Barack Obama rounded out his economic team Saturday, naming his choice for housing secretary, and gave new prominence to the mortgage crisis that has helped drag the country into a recession.

New York housing commissioner Shaun Donovan has been nominated to be secretary of housing and urban development, a post that Obama said would play a lead role in his efforts to stem the tide of foreclosures and rebuild the nation’s efforts to expand homeownership.

Speaking Saturday during his weekly radio address, Obama also said he had asked his economic team to develop a “bold plan” to increase the number of people who can stay in their homes despite being threatened with foreclosure.

The Federal Reserve estimates that lenders are on track to initiate 2.25 million foreclosures this year, more than double the annual pace before the crisis. Also, falling home values and a plunging stock market contributed to a $2.8 trillion in lost household wealth in the third quarter.

Donovan is joining a team led by Timothy Geithner, Obama’s nominee for Treasury secretary, and Larry Summers, who will lead Obama’s National Economic Council.

“We need to approach the old challenge of affordable housing with new energy, new ideas, and a new, efficient style of leadership,” Obama said when naming Donovan as his nominee. “We need to understand that the old ways of looking at our cities just won’t do.”

Donovan will inherit various tools to confront the problem. Obama has said he wants to use the second half of a $700 billion financial industry rescue plan to help stem foreclosures.

Also, Congress put in place a $300 billion program this year that is designed to let troubled homeowners swap risky loans for more affordable ones. However, few have applied.

Moreover, homeowners have continued to default on mortgages despite government efforts to lower interest rates and modify repayment terms.

Obama said Donovan will bring “fresh thinking, unencumbered by old ideology and outdated ideas” to the Housing and Urban Development Department to help resolve the economic crisis.

Donovan, head of New York’s Housing Preservation and Development Department, is a former Clinton administration official with a reputation for curtailing foreclosures among low-income residents, developing affordable housing and managing the nation’s largest housing plan.

Additional material from The Washington Post.

Short version: It Kicks Ass.

Long Version:So I stumbled across the beta of Google’s web browser, it kicks ass.  It has everything that firefox has but better.  It has the security and safety features i’ve found in firefox, but with a much cleaner more minimalist design.  It’s fast and the greatest feature I’ve had so far is it keeps track of the pages you visit most, and bookmarks you visit most, when you open a new tab or open the browser with no homepage set it puts you at a page that shows your top 9 most viewed sites and a nie preview image of each one, as well as your mostly viewed bookmarks.  In firefox I had 3 or 4 tab home pages that all opened when I launched the app.

Not only does Google Chrome launch a  lot faster and use less resources, I can just have it open on that 1 page and have my top sites there for me to easy choose, if I decide to go to another one I can easily one click open a new tab and second click get to my favorite pages, already in progress.  It also has a seach box there for you to search through your history, which is nice, I don’t know how many times I’ve tried to browse through hundreds of thousands of history items trying to find a specific page, it also shows on this page what was in the tabs you recently closed, so if you closed by mistake you can get right back easy.

It’s in beta but I haven’t really discovered any bugs yet.  The status bar is minimialized and only appears when status is changed, when it is static it dissappears, and when you have downloads the download manager is displayed in a nice small graphic area on this part.   It’s a very clean and well organized browser that gives you the maximum amount of screen space without sacrificing any information you need on screen, granted it doesn’t have the Add Ons I’ve seen on firefox, it’s a very powerful browser wrapped in a small, pretty package. 

Download the beta of Google Chrome at http://www.google.com/chrome 

(ps - don’t let me forget the “Incogneto Window” you can open that will open a new window except where it doesn’t save cookies, text box history, login names, page history, anythinglike that.. no worrying to clean the cache or delete cookies to hide big titty bonanza from our wife) 

Taken from their website, cause they do a good job describing what it is..

”

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine’s Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.”

 http://www.wefeelfine.org

here’s my contribution

I feel like masturbating all day, it makes me happy.

ATLANTA (Reuters) - Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss won a run-off election in Georgia on Tuesday, CNN said, denying Democrats the chance for a 60-seat “super majority” in the Senate that would have enabled them to pass legislation virtually at will.

Chambliss, an incumbent who first won his U.S. Senate seat in 2002, defeated Democrat Jim Martin for the seat in a race that gained national significance because Democrats and their independent allies held 58 of the 100 seats in the U.S. Senate after the November 4 election.

One seat in Minnesota, subject to a recount because the vote count was so close, remains undecided.

A 60-seat majority would enable Democrats to overcome procedural hurdles set up by Republicans, who are the minority in the Senate. Such a majority would have been particularly potent with a Democratic president, Barack Obama, in the White House.

Chambliss gained more votes on November 4, but fell short of the 50 percent-plus majority required by Georgia law. His victory surprised few in Georgia, a southern state in the most conservative part of the country that backed Republican Arizona Sen. John McCain over Obama in the presidential election.

Both candidates attracted national political figures in campaigning for the run-off. Former President Bill Clinton campaigned for Martin and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who was McCain’s vice presidential candidate, held rallies for Chambliss.

(Reporting by Karen Jacobs; writing by Matthew Bigg, editing by Patricia Zengerle)