First, the bailout was a waste itself. Why are we handing money to rich bankers and execs? Why not give the money direclty to people and workers and let them decide where/how to bank it/invest it?

Second, the oversight is also an expensive waste, costing millions and very likely ineffective. Every state has to set up its own regulation? Oh yeah? Let me know when Bobby Jindal has his committee up and running.

The stimulus should have been a simple-to-monitor pay-out directly to citizens, not this complicated easy-to-corrupt craziness. It should have involved on or maybe two federal agencies and the money should have been handed out two weeks ago.

Anybody seen any stimulus yet?

Hard-nosed Secret Service agent? Give me a break. This sorry story is going to haunt Obama for months and years to come. Beyond outright fraud, there will be endless bickering over what constitutes appropriate spending and what does not.

That is all.

Since when is the Secret Service a worthy judge of worthy public works projects?

Oh, and yet another "public" infrastructure of web oversight, RB? Who runs that? Was that budgeted for?

This whole article creeps me out. What a mess. It's all going to end up as endless court battles.

Right now I'm looking at a billboard advertising a hospital. It shows one black male doc in the foreground, three white female docs, an Asian woman doc, and, skulking in the background, one white male doc. I've been to this hospital, and I rather doubt the billboard accurately portrays the ethnic/gender mix of either the docs or the patients. So, what's the point? Also, why no pix of (East) Indians, who seem to have cornered medicine as well as the corner 7-11?

In the Super Bowl ads there were white guys of course, but usually portrayed as stupid jerks. The middle-aged white guys kept getting hit in the balls by flying objects. I've always wondered what feminists would deconstruct advertising that showed women getting hit/kicked in the crotch on a regular basis

It's a trend longer than the cuurrent economic turndown,though.

A few years back,the University of Wisconsin even crudely photoshopped a black man's face on a white man's body in its promotional literature. The photo was of a group of students and apparently they felt they had too many white guys at school (even though male university student numbers are in decline).

The University got busted because they rather crudely had reused the black man's face twice in the same photo. The same guy rather hilariously appeared twice! The media focused on the outrage of the re-used black face, but I was wondering about the white man who was effectively edited out by his university. What did he think about the University's racism?

But the blame whitey man movement seems to be picking up steam in the advertising world since the economic turnabout.

My own bank has stock images that it uses on its website. Women outnumber men literally 15 to 1 in these images by my count today. The only men that appear are an Hispanic looking guy with his family and a old feeble white-haired guy, his image tempered by his grey haired wife, of course. There are pictures of large groups of women by themselves, often cheering for some reason, but male images only appear with women. Men are not allowed any cheer.

Media flacks always seem to be women, and the scummier the company or politician, the less likely a white male will be spinning.

About the only advertising that still favors white men are ads for first class transAtlantic flights and Guns and Ammo.

If white women and girls had been tortured, rather than brown Muslim men and boys, there would be American officials seeking the death penalty for other American officials.

As the world grows smaller, as the economic crisis reveals the intricate interrelationships people throughout the world, we can either stand for one standard of justice, or we can fall.

The last I checked, we were falling.

Or anyone in the Democratic/Repubican ruling elite.

I wonder if now is the time for a third, protest party to run for the midterms. Populist economics, civil liberties. Payouts to the people, let them decide which banks to save.

I miss Colin Powell.

Lind argues for massive research on alternative energy sources to bring down cost. But, such research costs money itself, increasing the cost of these sources, even if paid otu of tax dollars. Where does Lind think this money is going to come from? The fricking tooth fairy?

More importantly, alternative sources already work great to decrease environmental cost. And conservation technologies are even better than alternative sources. Our environmental problems are not primarily technological--it's simply cheaper to produce power through burning oil and coal. What's interesting is how close the cost differential is now--we're within striking distance.

Lind's hero FDR actually laid the basis for cap and trade during WWII, by relying on the work of economists (primarily British) who advocated capping certain commodities and then distributing the right to buy them to consumers. Although these rationing systems were for the war effort (not the environment) and made it illegal to sell the coupons (though black market sales were not uncommon), the basic idea was the same.

Lind misunderstands technology, the environment, economy and basic history. His sort of idiotic revisionism will lead us right back to monetarism and Reaganism just like it did in the 1970s.

Get behind us, Satan. ;)