You guys! These were NOT irresponsible, selfish creeps. They were normal Americans. They believed the official bullshit, and now they are underwater on their house, and many of them have lost their jobs.

You betcha. I've heard the pitch: "If you buy now, further increases in home prices become your profit. If you wait, the increases just add to your cost".

I think pretty much everyone has figured out that home prices went too high. What people are fighting about now is who will take the haircut as prices decline to more realistic levels. We'll probably be stuck in a stalemate as long as everyone insists that other party(s) suffer the entire loss.

You misunderstand my position, perhaps because I didn't explain it in the brief post you responded to.

My gripe is that some people seem to think that homebuyers who overextended themselves should take in the neck, but investment bankers should be bailed out and get huge bonuses. IMO, they both did the same thing: They tried to profit by betting other peoples' money that home prices would continue to rise forever.

Equal treatment for ALL!

Yes. The investment bankers who bet that home prices would go up forever should be living in the street, right next to the wannabe homeowners who made the same bad bet.

What's the difference between banks that got into trouble by over-leveraging their investments in mortgages and individuals who did basically the same thing?

I was in kindergarten when I began to realize that simply calling names was not an adequate rebuttal of things I didn't want to hear.

liberal talk radio has not succeeded

It's easy to see why it hasn't.

Conservatives suffer from a lot of congnitive dissonance because their world view is in conflict with observed reality. They need to be repeatedly told that they are really right, and that all those nasty facts are lies. They tune in to conservative talk radio because they need to in order to make it through the day.

People who are more open-minded don't need this kind of reassurance, so they are less likely to tune into "liberal" talk radio.

$75 billion to prevent 4 million foreclosures?

That's almost $19 million for EACH prevented foreclosure! Are we insane? This is worse than lunacy, it is theft.

Those are American billions, which are a lot less that European ones: An American billion = 1,000,000,000. So that makes it about $19,000 per prevented foreclosure, which doesn't seem too bad.

First of all, it's "chute", not "shoot".

I'm not so sure. Perhaps libertyaintfree is suffering from projectile diarrhea.

Last time I checked,

neither al Qaeda nor the Taliban had [1] an air force, [2] a navy, [3] artillery and missile battalions, or [4] heavy armor mechanized units.

Not yet. Bush left an unfinished job in Afghanistan to go chase neocon fantasies in Iraq, and he let Osama and the Taliban get away in the process. Now Osama and the Taliban have set up shop in Pakistan, and guess what: Pakistan has nuclear weapons.

I have never stopped being amazed that people who already have more money than most of use could ever spend devote their every waking moment to acquiring more money as fast as possible. Even worse is the harm they are willing to do in the process.

What, specifically, did Bush do to prevent further attacks?

I don't know what he did to prevent further attacks, but he sure gave us a lot of "security theater" that didn't do much but create the appearance of action.

We've been attacked exactly zero times after 9/11 after Bush treated it for what it was: an act of war and reacted accordingly.

Why should they bother to come here to attack us? Bush sent a large number of U.S. troops to Iraq at great taxpayer expense so the terrorists could attack them more conveniently.

I think you could edit this article to replace every use of "radical Islamist" with "American conservative" and the result would make perfect sense.

The Republican Party is no different, fundamentally in its mindset, than the Taliban.

Republicans: The American Taliban.

That's a meme that might have legs.

3. eliminate income taxes on small business owners with up to 10 million dollars in revenue for 2009, which would allow them to hire millions of new employees.

I don't see how that could work. If you eliminate income taxes on the business owners, the owners would only see a tax benefit on money they pay to themselves. In this rather poor economy, I think they'd be inclined to take advantage of this by socking away as much cash for themselves as possible.

... a sign, as this person put it, that the White House is not committed to bipartisanship.

Or perhaps just not committed to the Republican definition of bipartisanship: Republicans dish it out, and other parties take it.

Vegas is remaking itself as an entertainment center, with shows and exotic vacation packages.

I'd expect those Indians and investors to cut some kind of deals with Hollywood to compete on the entertainment angle. That would seem to leave prostitution as Vegas' only advantage. I have nothing against prostitution, but spending billions on a train line to serve the customers doesn't seem like it should be a national priority.

So, we can decrease our usage of fossil fuel-burning, greenhouse gas-belching automobiles, and cut the commute time for Southern Californian gamblers at the same time.

Wouldn't it be more efficient to legalize casinos in California? That would create a nice stream of tax revenue for a state that badly needs it, and would also greatly reduce the resource waste of moving people great distances.

Correlation != causation.

It doesn't matter if it's true. The fundies are gonna go screaming apeshit bonkers at the idea of people having more sex for fun and not making children.