Some of those "women and men who have been kept in ignorance" would obviously include Rep. Smith.

For the past quarter-century, our government has been secretly seized by pod-people who believe in transferring wealth from the poor to the rich, and in putting rich old white men in charge of women's wombs.

It's time to turn on the light and send the roaches scurrying for the cracks. The most popular administration since Jack Kennedy stands four-square for reproductive rights, and if ignorant rich old white men don't like it, they can go suck an onion.

It's worse than that.

Unlike a car or bike, the U.S. economy can keep running on empty (wasn't that a song title?) so long as the rest of the world will keep buying our debt.

The tank is not only empty, except for two years under Ike and two years under Bill, it's been sucking a vacuum.

Obama's intuitively incremental bet is that we can keep running on empty a few more years without collapsing the tank flat. If he succeeds, wait for the howling at the moon when he returns to Kennedy-level taxes in his second term and starts refilling the tank.

For the past quarter-century, our government has been secretly seized by a species of roach-people who believe that wealth should be transferred from the poor to the rich, that rich old white men should control women's wombs, and that faith should trump science.

Isn't it fun to watch them scurry for the cracks as the light is turned on?

Just let the tiny autists and the parents who support them go into the woods and kill their next dinner.

Western Civilization is anti-evolutionary. Just look at the population numbers.

How can anyone with more than half a brain (the quarter-brainers are still showing up in the dumb-ass polls) not believe that a sorry old bulb-assed loser like Dick Cheney, who could not arm-wrestle his own mother, would not have been all over Fox News leaking like the dribble down his pants leg the very minute he had ever learned anything, any damned thing, useful from torturing idiots?

We, we the sorry voters of the United States of America, let these losers piss all over our Constitution for nothing.

Nothing!

I'm not too interested in the punishment aspects. I assume that cutting Dick Cheney's tongue out of his lying mouth would not be among the available options, however good it might be for the country.

But we need to have an investigation of the criminals, whatever the forum. Do it for the children.

We all know what happens to those who forget history.

Wasn't that the last year that Ike balanced the federal budget?

What would have happened if any one of the 183 waterboardings of Khalid Sheik Mohammad had produced a single piece of actionable intelligence, led to a single arrest, or prevented a single attack?

What would have happened is that Cheney and his sadistic, play-acting tough guys would have run all the way down the street to the Fox News studio to breathlessly leak the news. It didn't happen because, in addition to being a crime, in addition to being immoral, torture is stupid because it doesn't work.

I don't care about punishment, but we need to shine some light on these cockroaches, watch them scurry for the cracks, and begin to admit that, for the last 8 years, our national government has been run by a bunch of incompetent criminals.

An American President takes unscripted (OK, some were pretty predictable) questions at a press conference. The American electorate does not cringe in advance as he pauses to consider his responses.

There has already been a change at the White House.

Wall Street in general and these hedge bozos in particular are on the way to becoming the Louis XIV and Marie Antoinette of our age. Hope they enjoy their cake.

who invented the phrase "intuitive incrementalism"? It seems that Obama and Geithner are pushing what some call their hidden socialist agenda and others call a return to sanity about as quickly as the political system will bear, while still surfing ahead of the collapse of the economic system.

Here's a nonsequential thought on corporate compensation. How about we remove the corporate income tax deduction for all executive compensation in excess of what the President gets paid? Corporations can still pay whatever they want, they just can't ask the taxpayers to subsidize them for doing so.

Andrew may be in line for another flippant put-down on Professor Krugman's Times blog.

As with all these things, I assume that the most important parts are: 1) getting mentioned (not to mention linked); and 2) getting the name spelled right.

Imagine that you were writing a real-time econ column (what do we call these things in cyberspace?), and had reason to believe that Krugman was reading, or at least that someone was screening it for him.

No pressure there.

I want my next Supreme Court Justice to be a fully healthy, 40-year-old, out and proud gay, nonpracticing nonmagical Muslim or Jew, black woman who has publicly discussed the abortion that let her go on to graduate high school, enter an Ivy League college on affirmative action and borrowed money, become the first black woman to be President of the Harvard Law Review, and then devote her career to representing the homeless and indigent on the kind of salary that the Republicans allowed to the Legal Services Corporation while raising a bastard child out of wedlock, who is as far to the left in her thinking as the benighted Scalia is to the right.

Sounds like balance to me.

I am willing to compromise on a few particulars.

Gays? You must be a Republican, since you can't read numbers.

We currently have five creepy old white soft-armed conservative Catholic men serving as Supreme Court Justices.

Want to bet your next year's salary (you surely don't work for yourself) on who better fits the pedophile profile?