piece today. I for one am still trying to figure out how pumping all this bailout money from the top down is going to do a damn thing. It won't. They could start but pumping it up. Force consumer credit card lenders to cut rates to 5%. Stop charging late fees for a payment received late by 1 day (last one I got nailed with was $25-50 can't remember). Try a little student loan forgiveness or convert them all to fixed low interest loans like my fed subsidized ones. Don't pump a bunch into increased unemployment benefits except in the near term (maybe 18 months max) and find ways to put people to work. And for God's sake stop bailing out all the bankers and insurers that got us into this mess without freezing their pay and bonuses.

As Grandpa Fred said in Hunt For Red October "this shit is going to get (is) out of hand and we'll all be lucky to survive". Or as Steve Buscemi said "I got a front row seat to the end of the world". Either way things are getting really hairy. Sun laying off 6,000 and this thing hasn't even begun to unspool yet.

going to go suddenly silent now that they've been kicked squarely in the teeth by the silent majority of Americans who are hungering to live in the real world rather than the Orwellian fiction created by modern (neo)conservatives and their operatives in media. Peretz and his ilk are well funded and will spend every waking hour of their miserable little deluded lives attempting to undermine PE Obama as a person and as our President. I don't think the same can be said of the left and President Bush. It wasn't until he put the petal to the metal and squandered every bit of international good will, robbed us blind, and placed us squarely in the middle of an intractible immoral war that we started hammering him. And while I've seen people wish that "bad" things happen to the Mayberry Machiavellis, it was usually predicated on legal process and appropriate consequences for conduct and policies proved illegal.

I don't have any problem with anyone of whatever political stripe being critical of PE Obama's policies but the so called "self appointed mouthpieces of moderation" don't seem to want to allow for policy formulation to occur outside their little echo chamber. Why is it they think they should have any say in the form or substance of future policy? Their policies have failed craptacularly. People overwhelmingly rejected many of those policies very recently if memory serves. President Bush's regime was one of the most "politically experienced" ever and they botched everything they touched.

I ask three simple questions of every single person I meet who has the stones to admit they are still conservatives: 1) name one thing that the Bush administration has accomplished in 8 years in office that is cost effective, 2) name one way in which your life has improved under this administration, 3) why do you think it's permissible to saddle your children and grandchildren with crushing debt, and unsustainble economy, and a polluted environment. I usually get the same three responses which sums up nicely the current policy spectrum of the GOP--President Bush has kept "us" safe, he kept taxes low (although apparently only zero taxes would be low enough), and not my problem that's theirs. I think there is ample evidence that the modern GOP mindset is both delusional and sociopathic, yet it is reality based America that is derided as unpatriotic. Go figure.

stripping JoeMo of his chairmanship out of revenge wasn't necessarily politically the right thing to do and as his commenters rightly pointed out, "you're right Sandy, JoeMo should be stripped for demonstrable indifference to his duties as chairman and the fact he's not a member of the Democratic Pary". Let him caucus with the Dems all he wants but giving a non-Party member a plum committee assignment is a slap in the face to all Party members who've demonstrated competence and loyalty.

Rule of law . . . dead.

Accountability . . . dead.

Change (aka fixing things) . . . dead.

Economy . . . dead.

Representative government/self governance . . . dead.

Voting for mainstream party candidate . . . dead.

The people should not be afraid of their government, the government should be afraid of the people. The Dems clearly aren't. The GOP clearly is. GG, Chomsky, and Nader all have this exactly right. I'm just curious what label should be attached . . . corporate totalitarianism, facism, corporate neofeudalism, . . . what is certain is the system is broken. Maybe the key is we have to find the people with the skill set to be effective politicians and leaders, who don't actually want to be politicians but believe in sanity/rule of law/etc., convince them to run for office, fund them only with small donations, and help them get elected. Because at this point anybody who actually wants to run for office should be immediately suspect.