Prague is a great city, without the meetup I might never have gone there - so I am glad I went.

But the company was fun too - so all in all a great trip. Am lookin forward to the next one to Paris. :-)

But then again, how determined are they to prevent the system going down ? I'm sure tehre's all sorts of ingenious schemes these guys could invent to put lipstick on the pig and pretend all is well for another six months (while they ensure all their funds are safely elsewhere). I'm sure there's a lot of consolidation that can be done using pseudo-solvent parts of the banking system to rescue the series of Bear Stearns.

Heck, they could even write off huge chunks of foreign debt by giving it to whichever indebted nation is stupid enough to want to buy Wall St.

But regulate ? Nationalise ? what are you ? A commie ?

keep to the Fen Causeway

(1) Richardson
(2) Hillary

And for the last, oh, twelve hours or so, I've had this nagging feeling.  I forgot my badge this morning, so I had to go stand in the security office to get a temp one.  They play CNN on the tv in it, and the anchors brought up Hillary as a potential veep.  And the little gears in my head started turning, thinking about the various mixed-messages that had been "leaking" -- fake ones (damn, this guy is good at preventing real leaks) -- out of Camp O on veep stuff.

Now I've had the suspicion that, while Richardson would cement Obama's win in New Mexico, along with perhaps Colorado and even Nevada, Richardson would probably not be necessary or even optimal to get what we need to get out West.  And, for some reason, I get the sense the Obama campaign thinks that, too.

And that's leaves us with....

Going to collect my thoughts on this and post on it tomorrow.

One thing's for sure: The press hasn't the slightest idea who it is anymore.  Nor the blogs.  Obama is playing everybody like a fiddle.  It's going to be an exciting next few days.  And a helluva convention.

Where's your motherf*%&ing flag pin?