Phil Gramm gets legislation passed that partially deregulates the financial markets. The rich get richer yet, the poor and middle class get differing sizes of crumbs, and then in a few years, the schemes derived to make a quick profit turn out to be not worth the paper they're printed on. Remember "junk bonds"? Shouldn't the word "junk" in front of "bonds" have been sufficient warning?

Anyway, the shit hits the fan, and the government is suddenly the benefactor that can make all this go away. This reasoning brought to you by "free" market conservatives who are naturally suspicious of government. People who seem to think that anarchy and chaos is a good thing. The better for thieves to run rampant.

Like so many of the arguments conservatives make, the one for letting things "work themselves out" in the market is, as Barack Obama has put it, utterly divorced from reality. Until we are ready to have a conversation about a truly fair economy where everyone can participate and prosper, the only sane thing to do is have government intervention to contain the damage brought about by the unrestrained greed of the already wealthy enough. When you have business people complaining about "increased cost" while driving oversize trucks and SUVs named "Armada" and "Escalade" and "fixing" the problem by making workers pay in lost wages for their own unwillingness to make any meaningful cuts in their own lifestyles (or paychecks), you know that notions of truly ethical behavior have been ignored entirely. Take that notion to the securities markets and the commodities markets, let it run wild and you have what we now have: a meltdown that has even President Bush considering new ways to "stimulate" the economy.

Except you can't stimulate the economy without loosening the vise-grip on incomes and allowing them to (at the very least) keep up with inflation. No less a sage than Warren Buffet is saying that the rich should pay more in taxes. Shouldn't the bloated pigs on Wall St. be listening? How many more people have to suffer before something is done?

My sentiment exactly!

I'm not exactly thrilled that Barack Obama is a Christian.

But he does seem to be one of the rare Christians that actually cares about living his faith and the deeper meaning of the teachings of Jesus. Such people you can at least disagree with without it coming to blows.

Barack Obama and every one should be rightly offended by this type of talk.

You can debate whether Hillary felt entitled to the nomination without having to go off the rails like this and assume she was thinking that she deserved it because she was white and Bill Clinton's wife. For certain she has made comments that are below the belt, ignorant, insulting and calculating. But there simply is no reason for this. It's obvious Sen. Obama has a pretty large cheering section and devotion to his candidacy for President by some has reached the fever-pitch level of devotion to a guru. It's at least as weird as the devotion to George W. Bush and at least as dangerous for the country. Ditto for Hillary. What we have here is a bit of hysterical hero-worship and it really needs to stop. If cooler heads don't prevail in this matter, we may well elect a left-leaning (whatever that means) version of everything we despised about the soon-to-be prior administration. Beyond his rhetoric, this pastor/clergyman/shaman/houngan represents the inclination towards extremism that's at the heart of the American dilemma at this time. I'm looking for sanity and balance. I'm looking at Obama as a leader that can bring a cooler head to the hysteria that has been our politics in this last decade and beyond. Fanatics spewing forth their particular bias stir up more hysteria and overreaction and we could hardly use more of that right now.

Please. Stop. This. Shit.

By now I get that you support Hillary in her bid for the Dem nomination. But this charaterization of her latest controversy as "Clinton bashing" is just simply not consistent with this one point that, despite my own attempt to dismiss it as such, I can't escape. The point is that she could have made her point without any reference to RFK's assassination. There simply was no need for it. No context for it whatsoever. Whatever one might think of her staying in the race until the end is open for debate without that particularly monstrous bit of history being noted. Add to which that it's not the first time she's made that reference. This leads me to think that this is not just bad phrasing or an off-day for the campaign. It speaks to a very cynical sense of history and a not to subtle calculation that she could somehow benefit from a similarly horrific moment. Add to which, it comes just as Ted Kennedy, who is respected on both sides of the aisle receives a singularly terrifying diagnosis and the whole thing just sits badly with people. I can't get out of my head the question of just what the HELL she was thinking, and I'm worried what the answer might be.

I stand corrected on that piece of history. My bad.

However, to the larger point I was making, there is no context for what Hillary was saying and it makes her seem like her judgement is completely influenced by her ambition. That anyone could even imagine staying in this race "in case" something were to happen to the front-runner shows me, at least, that that person's been in Washington too long and has been utterly poisoned by its demented thought process. I've come to the conclusion that for the good of the Democratic Party and the country, she needs to step aside. Nothing good can come of her staying in now.