I meant jumping to conclusions.

The shooter is in custody. I'm sure he's well guarded, and probably won't be in any shape to be running around anytime soon. There's no need to decide what to do with him right this very second.

I'd rather see the Army take their time, get this right, and use what they learn to prevent a repetition. If they hurry up and screw up, they might end up missing another one.

How will you have smaller government while greatly expanding the military establishment?

Aww, come on. That's an easy one from conservative dogma 101: Make the president an absolute dictator and get rid of everything else except what is needed to make war.

Honestly all the GOP has to do is be there for 2010 and don't open their mouths and the rotten economy will hand them their victory.

Right, but Republican snake oil doesn't work any better than Democratic snake oil, so the economy will still suck when the next election rolls around.

This should simplify career planning for candidates of both parties.

Anyone who thinks this was NOT an Al Quada hit is naive.

It might have been an Al-Qaida job, and then again it might not have been. Thinking like yours is what got us into Iraq, and look how well that worked for us.

I think I'll wait for the Army to finish their investigation.

... that the massive gathering of data about the activities of Americans that started under Bush doesn't work very well. If this one got by, it seems doubtful that data mining exhaustive histories of credit card transactions would work much better. Perhaps DHS doesn't have the resources to really check out all the leads that can be found in the torrential flood of data they get.

Maybe we could do it if we hired the entire Chinese population to watch Americans, but then who would watch all the Chinese?

Oh, wait the unemployed, but then their opinion doesn't matter

Right. As soon as the sheriff evicts you from your house because you've been foreclosed, you become a target for the Republicans' perennial favorite voter registration purges. And if you're living in a car, a tent, or a cardboard box, you have no chance to getting the mailed notification in time to protest.

In other words, your opinion really doesn't matter because you're not allowed to vote anymore.

If you're a subsistence farmer in coastal Bangladesh, yes, you're probably doomed. If you're a Dentist in Germany, you're fine.

Does that mean global warming might kill off the poor people who have been getting all those formerly-American jobs?

Now we have to sit and watch as the repubs try to rewrite history and make Obama responsible.

You really should read today's "Tom Tomorrow: This Modern World" if you haven't done so already.

But it will be increasingly difficult to force equality of outcomes on a world in which manual labor is plentiful and where mobile human capital is the primary source of wealth creation.

So, we're basically screwed, and we're going to stay screwed as long as there are poor people to exploit somewhere in the world. It's even likely that things will get worse.

Well, that simplifies one thing: There's no point in talking about cutting taxes and regulation, because doing those things plainly won't help. If decent jobs are just plain never coming back to the U.S., then we might as well start raising taxes on the wealthy before the government is completely bankrupt.

P.S.: The same bit of deception was also used to start the great credit frenzy.

People don't like to admit that they're overusing their credit, so nobody really knows who else is doing it.

If an illusion of general prosperity is created, people who are having problems will think they they themselves are losers and they'll lean on their own plastic to conceal their failure. They have no idea that many of the apparently-prosperous people around them are doing the same thing.

...every time one of these economists or Wall Street CEO's pop off, they only illuminate how drastically out of touch they are.

Here's how it works: You're supposed to believe that everyone else is OK, and that you specifically are one of a small number of people who are having problems that are entirely your own fault.

I'll tell you what I would call "improvement".

I've seen economists and pundits arguing about whether this will be a "V-shaped" (single dip) recession or a "W-shaped" (double dip) recession. My personal fear is that it's going to be "L-shaped": It goes down and stays down, perhaps followed by domestic violence when the government can no longer assist the jobless.

I would accept any unmistakable evidence (which does NOT include the speculations of pundits) that my nightmare scenario won't happen.

Historically, when governments remove barriers to wealth creation or retention, an expansion of the middle class is the result.

I don't think history is a good guide now because our present situation includes a major factor that has no historical precedent: It is now very easy to send work to other countries where labor is very cheap.

If you think we are now in a recovery, please tell me where (what economic sector) the jobs will come from for Americans who are presently unemployed.

You might want to think a little bit about concentration of wealth. In particular:

1) What "natural" limits exist on the process (IE, when will it stop by itself without any intervention).

2) What kind of situation will exist in the end state?

I've offered up a few alternative politicians for your review as people who are more likely to be believable given their words on record, the consistency of same, and their voting records.

I saw your Conservative/Neocon list, but I don't recall seeing a list of believable politicans. I can see how I might have missed it because it can't be very big.