I never felt guilty watching The Craft. Rather enjoyed it. And I've only made it half way through beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Ebert screen play or not.

For guilty pleasures, how about Tomb Raider? Even has the gratuitous Voight sighting.

I hope that Guinness is on tap.

Your scorecard is amusing. There is no working missile defense system. Yet. There's a very questionable national security trade off with placing those missile sites within the former soviet sphere.

And Iran has by no means 'solidified'. Try checking out tehranbureau.com for example. The internal struggle between Ahmadinejad and his revolutionary guard cronies and dudes like Rasfanjani continues even without stateside media attention.

If anything, the threat to us remains the red Chinese, aka our bankers.

Making crap up about Death Panels and spooking spineless congress critters into striking section 1233 of HR 3200 doesn't sound like the work of a statesman. It sounds more like the actions for a demagogue.

So by my scorecard, you are 0-3.

I've been having to STFU myself lately. You are not alone. It's not easy reading through the lies and stupidity to find somebody you merely disagree with on substantial grounds. It's been a red against blue rugby scrum here. Which probably means we're not keeping our eyes on the ball and we're getting scammed. By who you may ask?

It's true we can't always trust government. It's also true we can't always trust business. I'm now having problems trusting our fellow citizens. We need to back off from a mob mentality. That's what happens to sheep.

No need to keep it always dialed to 11. Yelling and screaming and freely spraying the Anglo Saxon in a thread where one aspect of the conversation is restraint and civility when disagreeing instead of anger, hostility and aggression is irony in a sad, sad sort of way.

As with any issue I believe a strict adherence to the common sense reading of the Constitution should be kept. We have strayed so far from it at times, especially in the state I live, it's hard to believe we're in a free nation any more.

This sounds good at a surface level, but what does it actually mean? The reason judges exist is because reasonable people disagree on what things literally mean. Common sense isn't Common.

Are you proposing constitutional amendendments to change things? Or do you want to just selectively overthrow over 200 years of Congressional, Executive, and Judicial decisions? The latter approach is radical, not conservative in nature.

Technology has made individuals and groups (such as corporations) extremely powerful. I don't see how you avoid constraining the rights of some in order to avoid infringing on the rights of others.

Hi Joan! Not trying to be too snarky; I think the GOP tactics are effective because they can reach a critical mass of likely voters that is hard for most of the media and the politicians to ignore.

Will enough decent centrist/left leaning folk get outraged, or will you be a voice in the wilderness?

I think most people on the left are still wondering why Obama hasn't gotten it done yet instead of taking to the streets with pitchforks and torches to kick some congressional butt. Or at least some phone calls and pledges to fund alternative candidates.

I think the pols need to be called out for associating with these 'proud right-wing terrorists', but if you don't get any backup, you'll have to move on. I'm trying hard not to sound so cynical, but it's not working.

If profits were out of line, a competitor would immediately charge less for the same benefit and undercut them. Insurance bashing is a red herring, not a solution.

-ReaderReader

This is an article of faith. Studies out in the real world are showing the opposite. In various healthcare markets, there is increasing concentration of fewer insurers, meaning less competition. You can't have a market without talking about monopolies. Cartels and 'price fixing' may be technically illegal here, but that stuff still goes on.

I wonder what ReaderReader actually does for a living. Any business man or woman worth her salt gives lip service to the free market. Meanwhile, they are doing anything possible to dominate if not eliminate the competition so that they can make some dough. Any book on business will the discuss the need for natural barriers to entry, and products or services with good network effects. And I'm not saying this is morally wrong. It's just how things really work.

of providing housing loans to the poor and unwhite. That's why he wants to place Dodd and Frank at the epicenter of the finanical collapse when they are at best on the fringes.

He apparently wants to preserve Free Market mythology by ignoring the very real contributions of the repeal of Glass-Steagall, (submitted by Phil Gramm, that allowed now deceased investment banks like Bear Sterns and Lehman Brothers to issue a river of Mortgage Back Securities of dubious value), the non-regulations of Derivatives (such as those that caused AIG to implode - another Phil Gramm achievement), increasing allowable leverage in Investment Banks up to 30 times (heh, they have models built by Rocket Scientists), and finally the Fed that got the whole party started by keeping interest rates abnormally low through the early part of this decade. If the Fed had lent out money to Banks at 4% or 5% instead of at %1-2% (through 2001-2004), then home mortgages would have been at least 7% and the madness would have never started.

Free Money from the Fed, leveraged 30 times and leveraged again through lots of off balance sheet transactions. Plenty of people willing to flip houses (real estate only goes up, you know), plenty of investors looking for massive 'risk free' investments, plenty of real estate agents, banks, appraisers, town tax collectors, rating agencies ready and willing to look the other way as long the cash kept rolling in.

That's your financial bubble, in a nut shell.