Has anyone ever extrapolated the growth from 1992 to 2000, extended that growth to today, and compared where we actually are? It's easy to generate growth statistics if you first drive the economy into a hole, then measure your progress on the way back out.

"America gets the politicians they deserve. That's it. And you keep on struggling." Al Lewis.

It does no good to pretend that George W. Bush was some sort of alien anomaly. Bush was the product of the American political system (which now includes the Supreme Court and the media) in 2000 and 2004. The war which has become such an endless train wreck was eagerly embraced by the vast majority of the American voters and of Congress in 2003.

For the past six years, and the next two, George W. Bush is the President America deserves. The question is not about his madness, but our own.

Here in the Ozarks, we used to call them the Dog-litter Duggars, but that has come to be a slander on poodles.

Verily I say unto you, there is no one so foolish about money as a rich man.

(Alcoholics aren't too smart about booze, either.)

If I were internet savvy, about here is where I would post the icon with the flapping arms that says "This post is worthless without pictures."

A woman's external genatalia exist to give pleasure to (in this order):

Herself;

Her lover.

How she accomplishes pleasure should be beyond the curiosity of Broadsheet. Get a life.

What was Souter thinking? Who would have nominated his successor, back when the country was still crippled with a Republican Congress.

With the possible exception of the, what?, nine trillion dollar deficit that y'all's children will be wearing like Coleridge's albatross for generations, the greatest damage we will have to repair from the last quarter-century of Republican rule is the politicizing, and therefore the dumbing down, of the federal judiciary.

Souter's resignation would only have made things worse.

When will someone begin to compare Petraeus to William Westmoreland?

Didn't Westy explain to Congress that we needed to stay the course after Tet?

Aren't these they same guys who excoriated Clinton when he quibbled over the definition of "is"?

And isn't there a bit of a moral difference when, unlike with Bill, more American kids are dying and more Chinese dollars are being spent each day that these guys quibble?

Living in the Arkansas Ozarks, I always say that, but for papers, TV, and now the net, we wouldn't ever know whether we're in a boom or a bust. Unlike the Wal-Mart corridor, our modest housing expansion was just getting started, and was not universally welcomed. (Don't move here. You won't like it.)

Given Andrew's projection of the effect of the bust on the next presidential election, would it be unkind of me to hope that every housing contractor in Southern California (and Bentonville, for that matter) has filed Chapter 11 before November, 2008? It would be for the greater good.

I would quibble with Stiglitz only where he describes the tulip-bubble burst of the ARM market and the dazzling derivatives by which the quants made what was apparently something out of what was actually nothing as "the beginning of a downward spiral into poverty..."

These people were already broke, and, just like the Present Occupant, the money they were spending was not their own. It just took them until now to see that a tulip is just a flower.

Verily I say unto you, there is no one so foolish about money as a rich man. Unless it is the rich man's son.

Our friend Barry does not ally himself, in his lawyer-killing, so much with Bill Shakespeare as with Dick the Butcher, when in Henry VI, Part 2, the hoodlums plan to take over the world and find lawyers an annoying impediment.

In current times, it would appear that Pervez Musharraf would agree with him.

The Current Occupant has shown us, however, that for hoodlums to avoid the annoyance, it is not necessary to kill the lawyers, merely to carefully select them.

Was it only last week that Yahoo.com was being excoriated in a congressional hearing for violating its customers' rights by voluntarily disclosing information to the Chinese government?

It there any reason to believe that China's mandarins are less trustworthy than our own?

The solution to the subprime quandry is so simple it's almost stupid.

All transfers of mortgage debt should be with recourse. The original lender, which books those nice origination fees as immediate profit at closing, and all subsequent transferees of deceptive bits and pieces, should remain liable to repurchase and collect their share of the loan until it is paid in full.

How hard was that?