My Random Musings...

It's been a while since I have posted, been quite busy but there is quite a bit of info I wanted to touch on and articles/news I have read that are of interest to me.

Business
Consumer borrowing dropped big in Oct- http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/12/07/D8LS78KG1.html
Attack of the Wal-Martyrs (can't they go do something better with their lives?)
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/12/11/8395445/index.htm?postversion=2006112813

side note to that: the anti-walmart crowd was going to try to attract faith based folk to spread their message. When are people going to stop treating the religious crowd as a niche and start treating them as people that believe something? I haven't seen or read anything about the movie yet, but I feel like the Nativity Story movie is running along the same lines.

Along a similar note:

Who gives more? Conservatives or Liberals? Regardless, Sioux Falls, SD puts me to shame
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/12/who_gives_to_charity.html

Politics
My boy Jeb Hensarling won the head post in the Republican Study Committee (a big caucus of conservatives in the GOP). Hopefully we will see more of the younger, idealogical conservatives lead more instead of those that have gotten too accustomed to the Beltway.
http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/16180821.htm?source=rss&channel=dfw_news

Bush/Blair Press Conference Transcript from today
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/05/20060525-12.html

Sports
The last group stage of the UEFA Champions League pool play finished yesterday and the top 16 advance to tourney play. We need much more liquidity, bids/asks, etc on the champion over at TS but I have Liverpool (a whopping 2 contracts) to win. Real Madrid is a player and can turn it on instantly when they need to. I don't give Barcelona a chance of repeating. Read up on it yourself if you are unfamiliar:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UEFA_Champions_League
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UEFA_Champions_League_2006-07

I don't have an article for this but I believe this year is truly the year of the mid-major. Last year was a break-through for them with the Missouri Valley Conference but they are taking down the big boys early (UNC, LSU, Tenn- just to name a few). But besides Gonzaga, you got Wichita State and Butler cracking the top 25 early.