How does one extract profit forever from differences in wealth when doing so reduces the differences?

Bear Stearns: "We didn't learn a thing from the Enron fiasco, and we stupidly put ourselves in the same predicament".

This has been a fine display of how Hillary operates. I shudder to think of what she'd do in the White House, particularly with the expanded definition of presidential powers that Bush seems to have established.

... that people who are unemployed are likely to have both the time and the inclination to vote in the next election, and a bad attitude about current government policies.

Look, you just have to be patient. Right now she has to say she opposes the deal or she won't get elected. The situation will be a lot better once she's in office.

Save all your arguments for a position paper. They don't have to be true, they just have to sound good so we have something we can use to justify changing our position. Try not to use any obvious lies that can easily be refuted.

It doesn't matter if americans get fscked. She'll appoint the people who write the reports, and they'll be able to gloss over any ugliness that might make her look bad after the deal goes into effect.

Middle class people would certainly catch it in the neck. Whereas poor people in the US and elsewhere would literally get run over with a train. We would see hundreds of millions of people added to the rolls of the marginal poor world wide.

So what do you think we should do? The government's current plans seem to call for changing Wall Street's diaper, assuming much of their bad debt, and letting them continue as before.

I think that Wall Street needs some adult supervision, and also that they should pay more taxes.

I can't figure out why Hillary had this guy as campaign strategist in the first place. He is a professional manipulator, and he apparently has no grasp of the concept of avoiding the appearance of impropriety. Didn't she know she was asking for trouble?

IMO, the problem with this is that only the risk gets dispersed. The profits, when there are any, stay in the hands of the few.

I'm having a hard time understanding why Wall Street's activities are considered so beneficial that they deserve to be encouraged by hefty tax incentives.

Converting Yahoo to an all-Microsoft infrastructure would add significant distractions and costs at a time when Microsoft really needs to pay attention to their core products. Doing this in the unfavorable environment created by a hostile takeover would just make it worse.

I can't see what Microsoft hopes to gain from this that would be worth the hassle.

Second, far from bin Laden's "nightmare," the terrorist leader has actually said that al-Qaida's strategy "is to cripple the U.S. economy by dragging us into quagmires abroad...

Does that mean Bush and his supporters have been giving aid and comfort to the enemy?

... is that it suggests that Bush's "strategy" in Iraq depended on the cooperation of the enemy. How stupid is that?

The elephant just doesn't convey the essence of how they operate. I think a lemming would be more appropriate.

OK, so Hillary is changing images again. How many have we seen so far? Is any of them the REAL Hillary, or are they all bogus?

Just watch how fast our "service economy" collapses when more people have to stop spending on things they can do for themselves. The death spiral will get really steep when servers start losing their jobs. My guess is that there's a real live depression coming soon.

Trying to build a real economy up again is gonna really suck now that energy is so expensive and loans are so hard to get. I think the U.S.A. has really screwed the pooch this time.

I'll bet the administration "finds" Osama prior to the November election.

Either that, or Osama will find us. I'm kind of expecting a terrorist attack in the U.S. sometime shortly before the November elections. If it happens, it will be Osama trying to make sure McCain wins and continues the destruction of the U.S. that Bush started.

He said that progress has been made in Iraq, THEREFORE the new front is in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

I beg to differ. Afghanistan is the original front. We went there because that's where Osama was based. We almost caught him, but we screwed up and went off to pursue a neocon fantasy in Iraq. Osama got away, and now appears to have set up shop in Pakistan, which is a country that has nuclear weapons.

There is no credible evidence that "al-Qaida in Iraq" even existed prior to our invasion. If al-Qaida was operating in Iraq, it was almost certainly because they wanted to bring down Saddam and replace him with an Islamic theocracy. We've already done half of that job for them, and we've also turned Iraq into a marvellous recruiting and training area for al-Qaida.

Your interpretation of Crocker's comment seems to be that we've almost finished defeating an enemy that we either created or helped establish, and after five years of jerking around in Iraq we are finally remembering who the real enemy is.

Damn straight.

The American colonists revolted because they were fed up with being subject to the whims of an asshole named George. A lot of them died to win our freedom, and they went on the write a constitution that was designed specifically to prevent a repetition of the problem they fixed.

Now, the neocons would have us believe that it was all a mistake, and that we'd be better off with an omnipotent ruler who can do whatever he wants. It may be just a coincidence that the current poobah is another asshole named George.