You deserve the blame for this misjudgement. Fully and completely. Madoff did not steal your money. You voluntarily donated it to him.

"She was asking for it."

Sorry, while what Ms. Roth did was fundamentally unwise, the person who deserves all the blame is still Madoff. He didn't advertise that his brilliant investment strategy was really a Ponzi scheme.

Anybody who expects the Average Joe to be an expert in investing is an idiot themselves. You might as well expect people to perform brain surgery on themselves. These aren't skills our schools even come close to teaching the population at large - not even at the college level.

Hell, even the so-called experts were conned by Madoff. That's because finance is complicated and he was a slick, well connected crook - just like Mozillo over at Countrywide, the Arnalls at Ameriquest and all of the criminals running the moneycenter and investment banks in Manhattan.

As a dyed in the wool realist I suppose I should be happy to see my worldview validated by events of the past year, but it just makes me sad and angry - and not at the victims. Clowns like Madoff and his ilk should be strung up from the lampposts.

Is it greedy to want to invest your money wisely so you can have a decent cushion to live into old age on? Really? I mean, it's not like Ms. Roth made her money to begin with by evicting widows and orphans. Seems to me she sacrificed quite a bit to get to where she got to - and earn the money she earned - via her own talents and hard work.

Nobody deserves to have money earned thru the sweat of their brow stolen by a fucking thief, even if they are "greedy" for trying to maximize their return on investment.

Why are people suggesting that a minivan would be a better alternative than a Mitsubishi Outlander? The 4 cylinder Outlander got 22mpg in mixed driving, according to Consumer Reports. The two most fuel efficient minivans - Honda's Odyssey and Toyota's Sienna - got only 19mpg. So the SUV gets three more miles per gallon than the most fuel-efficient minivan.

Little "SUV's" like the Outlander aren't even real SUV's. They're typically based on car or car-like platforms, not truck platforms, and many of these smaller "crossover" vehicles get better mileage than any minivan. That's because they're nothing more than jacked up wagons.

If you want something that can haul a little cargo but gets good mileage, buy a Toyota Matrix / Pontiac Vibe - 27mpg in CU's testing (well over 30mpg on the highway).

Consumer Reports got 22mpg overall in their testing of the 4 cylinder Outlander. You can get a fairly quiet safe ride in a Toyota Matrix / Pontiac Vibe, along with 27mpg.

The most important data point I see is that the longest depression in this nation's history was attended by the largest increase in government power and spending in history until that point.

Actually, the largest increase in government power and spending in history came with WWII. Which, not surprisingly, ended the Depression.

You rightwing nitwits keep forgetting that the Depression continued to get worse - much worse - until FDR came into office. He was able to cut unemployment in half and recover much of the lost value of the GDP even with the half-assed efforts of the early New Deal. If he'd spent money the way the Japanese did, the Depression would have been over by 1938, as it was in Japan.

Must really suck to have all the facts arrayed against you.

>If FDR made a mistake, it was not spending enough.

That's simply an opinion.

No, actually, that's a pretty well-established fact. The Great Depression ended when the government started spending *real* money on the war effort, including a revved up TVA (building dams to supply electrical power for aluminum manufacturing and - later - for enriching the uranium used in the first atomic bombs) and billions thrown at the manufacturing sector to produce munitions. To give you some idea of how pervasive that money was, Rock-Ola, the jukebox company, became one of the producers the M1 carbine rifle for the US Military during WWII. They ended up making about 230,000 rifles.

If Roosevelt had spent that kind of money starting in 1933, the Depression would have ended years sooner - as it did in Japan, which went on a deficit spending spree not long after the Depression began and was out of it (and booming) by the mid-1930's. Then as now, rightwing ideology here in the US got in the way of making the obviously correct choice.

If you rightwing nitwits had been running the country in the 1930's, we'd all be speaking Japanese right about now.

>The TVA brought power to areas business refused to

>serve and still serves today.

I have never heard of business refusing to serve any area of the US.

That's because you're ignorant.

Even to this day, try getting high speed internet access in rural areas. You often can't, or you have to pay a fortune for it (even from companies which enjoy government-protected monopoly status). It was a similar situation with electricity in the impoverished rural south.

We learned all about this in high school. What were you doing instead of paying attention in class?