Been offline and now i'm in a hurry so I haven't the proper time to prep a rant against the bailout. Here's a few tips, though:

• If you have more than $80k combined at any one bank, move some of it into a new account at a different bank or into some other kind of investment. Immediately. Like, as soon as you read this. FDIC only ensures each individual up to $100k per bank.
• This is not a good time to be all in to any one thing. Are all your 401k/403b $$ in a single stock index fund? Best to move some over to treasuries. Are all your stock holdings are in one company? Think about the folks who held only AIG, or only Lehman Bros. Don't be like them.
• Looking for a stock to hold? I like Southwest Airlines because (a) I use their product all the time and (b) they've held up better financially than their peers and stand to gain as the others suffer some more. I also like Costco, since their business caters to people trying to save a few bucks, and that's pretty much all of us just now. They're also Apparently Not Evil. These two companies haven't paid off overwhelmingly in the time I've held them, but they've held up, and I hope that continues.
• Everbank's foreign currency-backed accounts [1] look pretty interesting. If I had too much cash in one place (not even close!) I'd probably move some into one of their currency index CDs.
• I own one stock that I expect to go up (it's been going up steadily in the past weeks): BRK.B [2]. It's not like I own very much of it - I'm a librarian, after all - but I've been steadily moving toward it for the past few years and it just keeps paying off. Check the headlines for clear signals that that's not going to change.

I don't like this bailout one bit. I haven't read the senate markup that passed tonight but the house bill was terrible. It doesn't address the key issues, it doesn't provide much potential benefit for the risk, and it's being crammed through like so many pre-emptive wars. *Nobody* I've listened to or read in the past few weeks who knows the history of bank panics, depressions, and credit crises seems to think this plan does anything to help people like you and me, and I'm inclined to agree.

I'm also inclined to never vote for anybody who supports it. Unless something changed drastically in the senate's approved version, this is a horrible, horrible mistake we'll all be paying for for a long time.