Anyone who has followed the financial sectors over the last several weeks knows that thing have not been going smoothly, to say the least.

The stock markets of the world have been taking a roller coaster type ride. Credit markets ground to a halt, and have only recently started moving again. Central banks dumped tons of cash into the system to keep a full on panic from occurring.

At the heart of all of this mess has been the implosion of the mortgage sector. I shouldn't have to go into all of the details behind this matter as Bonddad has done a fabulous job of explaining things.

Last night I was awakened (literally) to the messy reality that kicked started all of the market turmoil.  What I would like to do is relay my personal observations, as a series of vignettes, from one of the places at the heart of the meltdown...Atlanta.

On the day that some around here are calling "the second day of Fitzmas" you had to expect Dubya's administration to pull some kind of distraction out of their bag of tricks to distract people from how incompetent they really are...

So here's today's distraction courtesy of MSNBC:

Key al-Qaida figure reportedly captured

Suspect is a leader of European terror network, officials tell NBC News. In September 2003, Nasar was among 35 people named in an indictment handed down by a Spanish magistrate for terrorist activities connected to al-Qaida.

I just got home from work, and looked at google news (my afternoon ritual). And behold my tired eyes is this title:

How dumb do they think we are?

Of course I knew it was about the Rove leak affair before clicking, but I wanted to see if there was anything new.

And if you couldn't figure it out from the title the MSM dropped the "L" bomb. You know, the word NO politician wants to be associated with...lie.

Go read the article, or read excerpts and comments below the fold.

Personally I'm sick of the ongoing pie fight diaries. While I am on the fence for this fight (I can see why women would be offended by Markos' comments; I also believe that Markos needs to put up any ad that will help for the bandwidth we are using here) I find it really irritating sifting through all of the pie diaries, what 2 days after Markos' comment.

So I've decided on a protest diary to explain to people how tiresome this is for me.

Here's my take on the pie fight (be sure to check the end of the diary to see my point):

OK, first of all I hate to disagree with many (if not most) of the people here on this issue, but let me explain why I think we won this fight.

I know the fillibuster deal analysis diaries are a dime a dozen right now (with many from much more knowledgeable people than myself) but I'll add my $.02 to the debate after the fold.

Yesterday a fairly remarkable thing happened in the world regarding HIV prevention.

A country actually refused HIV related aid from the US.

This might sound like a terrible thing at first, so let me tell you (on the flip) why this is actually a wonderful thing.

(And excuse the long diary. I promise if you read to the end you won't be disappointed.)

So over at CNN I just read this story.

Here's the headline:

Follow me below the fold for the rest...

It's been almost two weeks since my last diary in this series. I said then that there was more on the way, I didn't lie. However, I idiotically started the series just before I went for spring break to New Orleans to visit my girlfriend. I appologize for the lag time in between diaries, the rest won't be so far spaced out: I promise.

So without further ado let me move on to my story. For those of you who missed the first diary, I would recommend reading it (even if it's extremely long). For those of you who did read the first diary: welcome back, this time things will be tied into politics.

So I want to commemorate the lapsing of my EMT registration with a series of diaries about a mostly ignored profession, being an EMT (for those of you who don't know, ew/they are the people who operate those nannoying ambulances ~ you know the ones you don't move over for).

I say that EMT's are mostly ignored because most people don't really think about us. When people (I'm mainly refering to the politicians) speak about our first responders they generally refer only to policemen and firefighters. Also, many people refer to us as 'ambulance drivers', which is duly aggravating as it implies that we don't actually do anything when we pick someone up.

So, in this (my first) installment I want to tell everyone why I became an EMT and tell you about my first call as an EMT. As a warning, for those of you with weak stomachs I will be covering some pretty disgusting things. If you are really easily grossed out I recommend another diary.

So, HIV is back in the news. Time for another diary from your resident HIV researcher.

Yesterday, Plutonium Page diaried a UNAids report warning that HIV could kill 90 million people in Africa over the next 20 years.

In the discussion that followed Page's diary I responded to questions regarding the development of an HIV vaccine, specifically why I think it will take 10 years or more before we have an effective one. (Yes, there are some being pushed through clinical trial, but the trials are more designed to test the safety of current strategies, and give information that can be used later. None of the vaccines have shown much promise at preventing infection by HIV.) I don't believe in all of the conspiracy theory nonsense surrounding this topic, and frankly I tend to get offended. So, please check the conspiracy theories at the door, read the diary and hopefully learn something.

Here I am reposting one of my comments from that diary for the educational purposes of everyone here at dKos.

I just found an article from yesterday listing all of the programs facing extinction or major cuts in Bush's proposed 2006 budget. (The article is from SFGate.com and can be found here.)

Below the fold I will put up the list provided there then go into my rant. Sorry if this has been diaried before, I did a search and didn't find anything in the last 24 hours...though alot of unrelated diaries came up in my searches.

Before Christmas I wrote a diary regarding a (then current) news story, which was a partial response to another user's diary regarding the same story. Unfortunately due to the nature of the science I will discuss here you should read those diaries and the news release (I put alot of information regarding basic HIV biology into my diary...and it is unfortunate because it turned out rather long, and somewhat related to what will be discussed here). You can find my diary here and georgia10's diary on the subject here.

The topic of this diary is a Yahoo! news release (find it here) that came out today about an exciting "new" discovery about the interaction of HIV and human cellular proteins. (And I put new in quotes because the original discovery of this interaction was published almost a year ago.)

This area of research is very exciting for a couple of reasons which I will discuss below the fold (and again I anticipate this to be a rather long diary due to the background I will have to cover, sorry in advance).

I am writing this diary in response to a previous diary written Monday by georgia10. You can find it here.

In that diary georgia10 shared with us a report from a research group at Rutgers. This group has apparently discovered new compounds that inhibit HIV replication. The report that was linked to made some quite exceptional claims, in fact the first sentence read in part:

In this diary I will try to educate everyone here at Kos about HIV, which happens to be my personal passion (I wanted to study it since middle school, and now I am doing just that). In the process, I will explain why what this group has done, while a step forward, is at best a small "breakthrough".

Sorry for the long diary, I really am trying to be brief (remember whole books have been written on this subject) but I think everyone here at Kos should be up to speed about HIV, it is an issue Democrats are strong in.

I don't do diaries normally, but I just got done reading an article that damn near made me cry (something I haven't done in more than a decade). The article is entitled "So This is Christmas, And What Have You Done" (hence the name of the diary) by Mike Palecek and can be found here.

The story starts like this:

Oh god, what did this man do to end up in jail you ask?

Sorry this is a short diary, but I wanted to relay something I thought of today (while bathing my cat, oddly). And I want to clarify that the title does not refer to myself.

I have been thinking about what makes GWB tick for the last couple of days. I have read alot of the stuff written by shrinks and MD types over the last 4 years. I still don't there is a good answer to this question. Is it greed? How about wanting to show up his daddy? Perhaps he really thinks God talks to him?

I don't really know...he's a really elusive person. I mean questions will arise about him, and they will be pushed aside. The next time the same or a similar question comes up he (or one of his henchmen) says it's already been discussed, so who knows what to think.

As a scientist who is currently in a PhD program I feel I need to educate the educated as to exactly how and why teaching creationism could ultimately lead to the downfall of the US economy.

As we can all agree here, the teaching of creationism is wrong. It is not science, it is the antithesis of science. I'm sure we all know that, but if you don't believe this I will discuss why this is (you can skip the next two paragraphs if you already agree so far).

More below the fold...sorry for the long post, but bear with me, this is important to know and keep in mind for the future.

The DNC has a new ad up for viewing check it out here:

http://www.democrats.org/index2.html

Quite a well done ad, and I'd like to see it get lots of airtime cause it attacks Bush without saying as much. Also gets the message across about so many things without mentioning them specifically. WTG DNC!

I just got done reading an article published in the UK Independent regarding the close election we seemingly have on our hands, and again the UK journalists have trumped our own in this year's coverage of our election. They point our the problems we are having here with fraud/intimidation/exclusion and go on further to wonder about the outcome. It's quite a good read and I highly recommend it (even though alot of it has been covered before). You can get it at:

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=575453

More below the break...