Other people have covered this territory as well as I have. Guess I just want to add my voice to the chorus. So:

• These people are assholes and leeches.
• You really shouldn't have to be evicted out of your own apartment.
• However, due to laws in your state and/or city, you may be legally screwed.
• Even if you aren't legally screwed, you shouldn't waste your energy and resources supporting or being with these nasty little leeches a moment longer than you have to.

So with that in mind, I advise:

• Find out your rights and liabilities.
• Talk to someone with experience you can trust-- that may be a renter's association, a lawyer, or your landlord. You may need to talk to all three. Be damn sure of your rights and liabilities before you move forward.
• Get out. Or get them out, if you can't get your name off the lease (if this is the case, blame it all on the law or the landlord). Don't fuck yourself over being 'the nice person' or 'the asshole.' It's not worth it, either way.
• As another, wiser poster said: Cover Your Ass.

Don't be angry with yourself for being a nice person, but do ask yourself how you let this happen to you. There's a balance between being nice and being a doormat; you can find it.

Good luck to you, LW. I hope you come out of this wiser and happier in the end. (And with a nicer apartment than the leeches!)

Are also a warning sign for diabetes.

For years during the Dark Ages the Catholic church forbade using Arabic numbers for that very reason. And the rhetoric being used now often makes me worry we're sliding right back there. (Global warming is an invention of crazies! The 'towel-heads' are out to get us!)

I too was waiting for the self-righteous alarmism of Golden Boy. This is a different tack for him; let's see how successful he'll be.

Will you be offended if I start a drinking game for your posts?

Oh wait. I don't care if you're offended. Never mind. I think the first rule will be to drink every time you offer up a new straw man (Ward Churchill, for example) when the first one gets knocked down.

The second rule will be to drink every time someone smacks you down and you ignore it.

The third rule...oh, who cares? I'll be plastered by then.

at least 30,000 American's [sic] and their families got some good news.

How sad it is that we've come to this: that "Good news" qualifies as "well, if you can make it alive or unmaimed for a few more months, a small portion of you guys get to go home."

Never worked for me.

If we had a culture where leg and armpit hair was acceptable, it'd be one thing. But with the age of puberty getting younger and younger, I can't see this as such a bad thing.

I'm still amazed and disappointed by how little coverage private contractors get. Remember "the Hessians" of our own Revolutionary War? I suspect Blackwater employees will be spoken of the same way in some future Iraq (partitioned or otherwise).

I would've loved to see a full-page ad taking down Petraus's poorly-sourced charts and graphs.

I have mixed feelings overall about the ad-- it has become a tremendous distraction in MSM coverage. On the other hand, it might be the only strong dissent that's talked about at all, without it we might have been subjected only to the Serious Wisdom of The General and The Decider.

But alas, we still care about OJ, as these crazed letters and the firestorm of coverage proves.

As for the rest of it, I'll just say that I didn't realize Fred Goldman's first priority should be his Standing In for All Jews, rather than, you know, wanting justice for his murdered son. He's probably half a bubble of plumb, but damned if I wouldn't be too, after hearing my kid's murderer trash him as a drug dealer.

Point taken that only time will really tell, but I think the only reason we're talking about this sordid robbery at all is because the original murder still has legs. It's like a Rorsach test for turn-of-the century America.

If race is really no big deal in the NFL, why are there so few black QBs to begin with, when so many players overall are black?

As for the vote, King, I say 'all of the above.' And I voted just to send the damn ball to Cooperstown. There's a question for another day: would we be so excited to vote on a white guy's ball? Okay, Mark McGuire wasn't an asshole like Bonds, but it was pretty damn clear he was getting some extra chemical help on the way to his record.

It'd be enthralling, if it wasn't real.

Fortunato, your comment reminded me of an Internet mailing list I was on many, many years ago when the topic of homosexuality came up. One woman (from Illinois, IIRC) said that the whole thing was unfamiliar to her, as she didn't know any gay people.

I rarely laugh out loud at the computer, but I certainly did then. She worked at a nationally-known corporation, she graduated from a large high school, and there were several gay people on the mailing list we were both a part of!

She saw what she wanted to see: a clean, sanitized life, free of the demon homosexuals. I suspect a lot of the 'fear of the unknown' among Christian-rightists and the like is really fear of acknowledging what's right under their noses.