It's not some unalterable doom that dictates that every global economic power must crash and burn. We Americans chose a course of action, in terms of economic policy, that over several decades has resulted in severe structural weakness — but it took a lot of doing. The edifice of American prosperity was solidly real. It didn't get hollowed out in the dead of night in late 2007 by Bush cronies.

If we want someone to blame for this, let's blame the people who, by enthusiasm or omission, supported the long trend in deregulation and de facto amnesty for reckless fiduciary wrongdoing. Rather than Thomas I give you Kelly: we have met the enemy, and he is us.

The net is still free because access remains largely unregulated, beyond the establishment of technical standards to ensure connectivity.

Sooner or later the people who were part of the systems of cultural and technological control in the bad old days will make a serious play to change that, by imposing some kind of licensing scheme on net access. The goal will be to track and control our behavior online, restrict content production, and enforce whatever limits on usage they deem in their best interest.

When that happens, we as a people will have several choices. We could end up with something relatively benign, akin to automobile licensing, whereby the system serves primarily as an economic barrier to entry and an enforcement of good behavior — go where you want, do what you want, but don't get crazy or go too fast.

Or it could end up like radio broadcasting, in which a fundamental distinction is enforced between provision and reception of content. Imagine needing an FCC license to operate a server, with a HAM-like provision for a small community of IRCers.

It's possible of course that the net will always remain as open and freely usable as it has been — but that would be something new.

Park City blanketed in whiteness is a perfect backdrop.

It's ironic that the utopia Andrew O'Hehir's subjects talk about is created to such a large extent by their fellow Angelenos — particularly the wealthy ones whose decisions and lifetsyles have actively or passively perpetuated ghettoization in the first place.

The Man giveth, the Man taketh away.

On another level entirely, Editor, this was a great use of video in reporting. More would not be too much!

It's nice to read some "big picture" analysis of the presidential race, rather than the usual stat-comparing drivel one can get anywhere.

In particular, Walter Shapiro's characterization of Bill Clinton as seeing himself perpetually as the underdog, no matter how ludicrous it might be to do so, comes close to the very essence of Clinton's personality.

But a few things about Shapiro's treatment of Bill Clinton sound a little off, which is especially surprising for someone with his experience. For one thing, he writes

... in a way that is reminiscent of that sad-eyed year 1998 ... Bill Clinton is once again a double-edged sword for the Democrats.

I don't know about Shapiro, but in the 1998 I lived through, Bill Clinton was more popular, despite impeachment, than he had been in the 1996 election — and it was those Democrats who distanced themselves from him, specifically, who suffered the most in mid-term electoral losses.

Clinton was a problem for his party, yes, but it was the party's problem — class anxiety over an intellectual from back-country roots who didn't follow the rules of their social clique — not Clinton's.

In addition, Shapiro seems to regard Clinton's poor treatment by the press as a vindication of his thesis that the old man doesn't have the right stuff anymore. But since when has Clinton ever enjoyed favorable press? What horked newspeople off was that no spin you could put on the man would ever stick. No matter what you said about him, he was still popular — his message always seemed to get through to the people, regardless of how much news people smirked as they delivered it.

There are a lot of criticisms to be made of Bill Clinton, but that he's a liability to his party, or that he's only recently become a lightning rod for unfavorable press, is not among them.

Nice balance between Singer's almost-too-easy familiarity and Zacharek's filmgirl intensity. And watching the pair of them blush over the subject matter of Teeth was kind of adorable.

I go with the third probelm Thomas Schaller listed above the others. Listening to John Edwards I felt like he was making a pitch he'd made a thousand times before as a trial lawyer — "the defendant deserves this compensation, and the corporate bad guy deserves to pay."

I'm not unsympathetic to this sentiment, but Edwards' pitch has a very discernible "take the money and run" aspect to it that I suspect alienates a lot of Americans. Yes, if it's between their neighbor and the sleazy car company that skimped on safety features, sure, they'll side with the neighbor. But that's not an impulse that translates into national policy.

But let's not write Edwards off completely! How many campaigns has Joe Biden unsuccessfully run? Edwards is sticking it out and more power to him. He represents a small faction of his party that could nonetheless be crucial at the convention. There would certainly be justice to poverty playing a spoiler role in the campaign — and if one candidate makes the kinds of commitments necessary to pick up the stray votes but the other doesn't, isn't that something we'll all be glad to know about?