"...according to the latest numbers from the influential Case/Shiller home price index, housing prices fell ten percent year-over-year in January."

And this is a problem why exactly?

I mean it's a problem if you're a home owner who paid too much for a house, expecting to sell it for even more to someone else. I mean you KNEW you were paying too much, but what the hell, there would always be some other chump who would pay more so why not screw him?

But for those of us who would like to own a home and who have a realistic notion of what a home is actually worth, we have been locked out of the market since, oh, 2004 at least. When gross asset inflation was hitting the dot-coms it was no big deal because we didn't need dot-com stock to live--I could opt out of the madness. With housing, I am forced to play in the same imbecilic game as you bush-league Trump wannabes. I don't want to get rich. I just want a place to live. Is that okay with you?

The greed and stupidity of millions of get-rich-quickers has resulted in a vast overbuilding of overpriced, flimsy, energy-intensive, and financially- and environmentally-ruinous suburban sprawl. People like me and my friends have been gentrified out of our cheap, funky old urban neighbourhoods. All I ever wanted out of life was to live downtown, walk to work, work enough to pay my rent, read books and not bother anybody. That's all I wanted but I couldn't do that anymore because somebody thought they could turn our workshops and apartments into $300,000 condos which would be bought and flipped for $500,000. (To anyone living in Montreal, Quebec, two words: 10 Ontario.)

If you are one of those people, you're stupid and greedy, and you have destroyed my world, and you deserve everything that's coming to you. I hope you lose everything and go bankrupt because that will keep your credit rating low enough that it will be years before you can wreak havoc with your moronic herd behaviour again.

"the Wall Street Journal reported that the top 1 percent of Americans earned 21.2 percent of all income in 2005."

I take issue with the use of the word "earned."

I love the show and find it to be easily the smartest one on TV for a long time. However, one embarrassing little thing that, thankfully, they've moved away from...

In the first few episodes, when they're having sex, Six's spinal column glows. You'd think a cylon's partner would notice something like that. Do Mormons not do it doggy-style or what?

People have rosy memories of the Clinton years only because what happened before and after were so horrible. You know, the way Dachau really made you appreciate Weimar hyperinflation.

If the Clinton years were so good, why didn't Americans get universal health care? Why did public schools continue to decrepitate? Why didn't vehicle mileage standards improve in a meaningful way? Why didn't anyone do anything about global warming, already known by 1995 to be a fact (despite that era's corporate disinformation and today's corporate revisionism?)

What would Barack Obama have done with the peace dividend? What would he have done if he came to power just as the Internet and computer technology became ready for prime time? What would Barack Obama have done had he become president just as the North Sea oil field was hitting its stride, securing low energy prices and stable supply?

What would Barack Obama have accomplished with all the gifts history bestowed on Bill Clinton? Would he have ended welfare as we know it? Would he have presided over the grotesque swelling of the American prison-industrial complex? Would he have allowed women and children to be murdered at Waco?

And, after eight years of Barack Obama, would the contest between his Democratic successor and the Republican challenger have been close enough for the latter to steal? Indeed, after eight years of Barack Obama, would millions of voters take it as a basic fact that Republicans and Democrats are identical, that McBama equals O'Cain? Would anyone even think of making that kind of joke?

a 3 a.m. pick-up is sort of a desperate last resort...

We crazy lefties were absolutely, one hundred percent right about global warming, back when there was still an Ongoing Debate. (That's back in 1991, by the way. I know the world is furiously backpedaling and trying to pretend there was no way of knowing until about 2001. Ach, ve didn't know! Keine Nazi hier!)

We kooky, nutty liberals (ooh, those rotten no-good liberals! With their flag-burning and their America-hating and their... their... their LEARNING FRENCH!) were right when we said George Bush would be a terrible president, that he would use 9/11 to completely destroy the rule of law and to start one or more wars, that he was lying about WMD's. We were right, right, right, absolutely right. Told you so!

Now we're right again. A system where one big investor's success is his and his alone (he Took The Risk! and so he Reaps The Reward! Condolences, Mr. Lebowski--the bums lost!) is protected from failure by 6.7 billion human shields.