I don't think that Edwards should have to apologize for anything. He's right, being President is a tough game. What would the news headlines have said if it had been Obama getting all choked up? I for one don't need a president that wells up with tears at every obstacle.

"Excuse me, Madam President, the Russian Prime Minister is on the phone. He says that your shoes don't match your purse."

"What!!???, I thought we were BFF's, OMG!! Bwaaaaahhh!!!!"

It's a man's game, Hillary. Take it like one if you want to play.

Hillary is nothing but a phony anyways, what with her faux southern accent whenever she's south of the Mason Dixon Line-hard to believe the tears were for real.

I like Bill, and the thought of another term with him in the White House is tantalizing...oh well...

Maybe I missed it, but from my understanding free markets don't "break." In fact, it is only when we try to steer them that problems arise.

The fact is that the market isn't broken. It is working perfectly fine. These large banks made gravely bad decisions, and they will reap the consequences. This is the free market in action.

There's no guarantee that, short term, we won't see fluctuations. But in the long run things will be fine (never mind that Keynes fellow and his comment about the long run).

So China owns a piece of "OUR" companies. Sorry, but money is stateless, capital flows to wherever it will find the greatest return (nature abhors a gradient). As Smith says, "If goods (dollars) don't cross borders, armies will.

Here here

You may wish to retake that Econ class. If they were talking about market failures in MICROeconomics...well...you may have been thinking of MACROecon...I don't know.

Please show me an example of a long term free-market failure. You can't. Your failures are, always, the result of a not-so-free market. I will concede that there aren't many long term free market cases to examine. Even what we have in the US is hardly a pure free market.

ATT had a monopoly until MCI "Slipped in to take their trade away." And it was only the DEregulation of the airlines that gave us much lower airfares. Ditto for what the satelite TV companies have done to the cable companies. Ad infinitum...

Gee, I don't really notice much of a shortage of, say, Toyota Camrys.

So the Chinese own Citibank? Who cares? I hope they make a pile of money so they can buy more of our crap. That's a billion consumers ready to buy Big Macs, Apple Computers, and Tom Cruise DVD's, or whatever.

GO China!

Okay already. Let's just get this recession on so we can move on to other things--like who will win American Idol.

I, for one, am tired of hearing the press babble about it. "Will there be a recession in 2008." "Are we heading into a recession?" I don't know and neither do you. Maybe we will and maybe we won't. It won't be the end of the world. It's called the business cycle folks, and it's been happening for centuries.

Recently, the R word has bandied about with increasing frequency--and most predictions have proved to be wrong. Obviously, if you run around predicting a recession long enough, eventually you'll be right.

I do worry about the press's influence, though, and its ability to actually shape perception, and therefore (sometimes) reality.

There will be a TV show called "The Moment-of-Celebrity-Don't-Forget-Who-Wants-to-Be-a-Fearful-Untalented-American-Idiot-Apprentice-(of Love)-With-No-Dignity-Factor-Poop Eater."

On this show, contestants will eat fecal matter, drink urine, and vomit on each other--all for one dollar in prize money.

Hosted by Howard Stern, it will be a ratings blockbuster.

Where's Emmanuel Goldstein when you need him?

If McCain pulls this off I think I will be ready to move to antarctica. I'm rapidly losing patience with the American people's stunning inability to figure things out.

"God Bless Antarctica"

For the overwhelming majority of our lives, oil was the cheapest liquid on the planet. No wonder we've used it with little thought of tomorrow. Now, it's not so cheap and we're feeling the pinch. What will happen? Two things:

First, we will use less. To give an example, my wife and I have started carpooling 3 days a week--probably saving about $200 per month. And it's funny: As we go breezing along in the carpool lane I can't help but notice that the vast majority of cars in the other lanes have exactly one passenger--the driver. Apparently the price of oil isn't high enough to yet make people change their behavior, but they will. We waste so much...

There are massive opportunities for further savings in telecommuting. I am somewhat dismayed at, and often reflect on, the fact that I drive 50 miles to work each day to sit at a desk in a cubicle with the same laptop that I am now typing this letter on (at starbuck's). Like many in the corporate world I have a laptop with full remote access to the corporate VPN. In other words, there's little need for many of us "knowledge workers" to drive to work at all. I only hope that, in the future, more companies will embrace telecommuting and abandon the "face time" paradigm.

But enough about that...

Oil is cheap, when the price (and therefore profits) are high enough some enterprising engineers, scientists, and business people will find a way to give us what we want (energy) at a lower cost. It's just a matter of time. But heretofore, it just hasn't been worth it when a barrel of oil is cheaper than a barrel of Vitamin Water. Would you want to enter this business? Or would you rather join "Fiddy" and sell the H20?