Maybe his wife's bankruptcies were not a direct contributing factor in Edmund Andrews' mortgage problems, but a lot of people might have suspected otherwise if he'd mentioned them in his book. My guess is he deliberately left them out to make the book more believable.

However, I think he's screwed now that the cat's out of the bag. Regardless of whether or not the bankruptcies were a factor, lots of people are going to cite their omission as proof that the book is bogus. I don't think this will help sales of his book.

What was he thinking? AFAIK, all bankruptcies involve the courts, and it's damned near impossible to hide all records that they happened. He had to know that someone would go digging and find this, so why did he take the risk? Or is taking that kind of risk for possible profit what got him in trouble in the first place?

Obama met Sotomayor for the first time on Thursday, during a secret, marathon seven-hour session in the White House, aides said. They talked constitutional law for an hour.

When was the last time we had a president who could have a meaningful discussion of constitutional law with a judge?

... my boss at the time said "When more than one person is responsible, nobody is responsible". I think this is still true, and also that our government deliberately uses it to avoid blame for their screwups.

"Bill O'Reilly doesn't understand"

There's another company with a solid track record of using profits from their cash cows to finance losing efforts: Microsoft.

why the anger?

I sort of got the impression that Jordan's knickers are in a twist because Google isn't frantically worshiping at the altar of the almighty dollar. American companies are expected to burn their people out and throw them away in an all-consuming effort to make as much profit as possible as soon as possible.

Maybe people should give patience a chance. Look at our economy and think about how well haste has served us.

So far I see as much evidence for anthropogenic global warming as I do for Intelligent Design, i.e. nothing beyond what some religious fanatics with an agenda are promoting on faith.

It is amusing to hear conservatives howling that global warming is a fraud and demanding incontrovertible proof before anything is done about it.

The very same conservatives have been trying to push their own agenda of outlawing abortion based on the assertion that a fertilized ovum has a soul and is therefore fully human. I await their proof of this assertion.

I am as atheist as they come and try to change the subject to religion is rather absurd.

I wasn't changing the subject. I was responding to your comment.

I'm pretty sure it was you who said "...nothing beyond what some religious fanatics with an agenda are promoting on faith. Was I mistaken? If not, then how was I changing the subject?

Alkaline, you thought you scored a point by asking me a religious question about abortion because you (wrongly) believe that anyone who is not a liberal must be a Christian or some other unworthy.

I just made a comment about an inconsistency I noticed in the conservative agenda. It wasn't aimed at you.

The only reason I put it in a reply to you was because your comment prompted the thought.

Alkaline, understood, but now you don't really seem to have a point. Perhaps you can explain your position again.

My point is that we seem to be pretty inconsistent in the way we decide what situations require action.

Sometimes, the mere suggestion that something bad might happen is used to justify measures to prevent it, even extreme measures. Other times, rigorous proofs are demanded before anything is done, sometimes without regard to the potential harm of inaction. Which approach it taken seems to be mostly a matter of the whim of whoever is in power.

I'd be interested to hear if you have any ideas about more objective ways to deal with such situations.

We're going through some serious economic difficulties right now. You might have noticed.

A few people saw the problems coming, but they were ridiculed and scorned by conservatives, much in the way that conservatives are heaping ridicule and scorn on global warming. Alas, the economy was too complex for the critics to be able to formulate a solid proof that something was wrong, so we continued on our way until we hit a brick wall. Now we are suffering for our reckless behavior.

ISTR a similar scenario in Iraq. Conservatives kept harping on what an awful menace Saddam was, and on how quick and easy it would be to depose him. Critics who said otherwise were shouted down by the right-wing noise machine. Look how that worked out. We've been in Iraq longer that we were in World War 2, and there's no end in sight for Iraq.

ISTR a similar scenario with Ronald Reagan's "trickle down" economics. For years, we've been giving all the breaks to wealthy people because we were promised that doing this would create prosperity for all of us. Look how that worked out.

I'm not impressed by the conservative track record. They have a pretty solid history of promoting whatever is in the best interest of their wealthy and powerful patrons. The rest of us get empty promises that are never fulfilled.

There are a lot of people who have a vested interest in continuing our previous energy policies. It seems that a lot of the critics of global warming are funded by those special interests. I think all of this noise about global warming being a fraud is just another example of conservatives rallying around their patrons' causes. Go ahead and make all the noise you want, but remember that you are on the side that has credibility issues.