California, and Southern California in particular, has quite regular boom/bust real-estate cycles. People who invest here understand that, and plan accordingly. The smart ones do, anyway.

Everyone else always assumes that when the boom begins, it will go on forever, and no matter how stupid your loan might be, the market will bail you out.

I'm sure your analysis has more support than mine. But I do think there's something to the notion that California home-buyers are the most idiotically optimistic group of people in the known-Universe. They actually believe that the normal laws of the market don't apply to them. You would not believe some of the rationalizations I hear at various gatherings of people who should know better. They'd tell you the sky was a deep violet at midday if the future price of their real-estate depended on it.

California is different, in this, as in so many ways.

so, does Levin mean that the GOP will abandon America for the Democrats to run? Because if that's what he means, I'm all for it!

That kind of mindless comment is exactly why the right-wing in this country shouldn't be allowed to run a lemonade-stand. Out of their own mouths, they're a bunch of hopeless idiots.

I'd be inclined to say this is idiocy born of desperation...but, based on observation over many years, I think this is just your plain, garden-variety idiocy.

One need not play a game to know what the end of fossil-fuel energy looks like.

At first, everything will muddle along as it is, as politicians desperately try to preserve our profligate, suburban-sprawl-driven life-style. That will be our downfall: most of the middle class in this country lives in suburbia, drives wasteful transportation, and has NO intention of giving up any of it.

(see: http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/ for a detailed analysis of this particular aspect of the end of fossil-fuels)

In human history, when a resource runs short, what generally happens in the one group of humans will attempt to dominate another group, and take what they have.

In general, when humans run out of a basic resource, and they can't find an easy substitute, they will lie, cheat, steal, and kill to get said resource.

A cursory look at human history shows this to be true.

We have not outgrown our evolution as savage plains-apes, as will be perfectly obvious, if it isn't already, by-and-by

if you're a godless liberal and you do something morally suspect, you can never be forgiven.

But if you're a right-wing whack-job, and you ask God for forgiveness, and he forgives you, then everything is fine, it's as if nothing ever happened.

Look back over the history of these things and you see that's how it goes. The moral and intellectual bankruptcy of these people is really quite stunning to contemplate...but, then, it's hardly anything new. Mark Twain was reaming people like this a new one a hundred years ago.. as were people like Aristophanes long before Christ was supposedly born.

It has been ever thus.

Does anyone realize that the only reason Fred Thompson has any play at all is because he had great writers on Law & Order? All the best writers for the spoken-word are in Hollywood, or in movies and TV anyway.

The political landscape is full of hacks, by contrast..

So, Thompson is about to find out just how important a good writer is. And I doubt he has one.

If his performances to date are any indication, Thompson may turn into the biggest flop in recent memory, and it's going to be a lot of fun to watch it happen.

maybe I'm way behind the curve here...but what are the chances that most democrats in the House and Senate voted for the AUMF out of a completely cynical conviction that if Bush didn't invade Iraq they'd look good on the slopes, and if he did, he's screw it up so bad that he'd get pasted in 2004? And they'd still look good on the slopes?

If that's what happened--and it seems all too plausible--the dems should have fought harder to win in Ohio in 2004.

They probably thought that the GOP couldn't possibly weasle out of the Iraq disaster. And they must have made the elementary error of underestimating the gullibility of the American Voter.

Because nothing else really explains such a stupid-ass vote. Not even that cooked intelligence (easily shown to be the fakery it was, even then).. Nothing other than misplaced political cynicism explains giving that much power to a man every one of the dems on capitol hill had to have known was a useless waterhead.

And that's not hindsight. That was known, AT THE TIME.

Yeesh..makes the current debate all the more contemptible.