Thumbs WAY down to "The Big Lebowski", on the other hand. It was horribly, excruciatingly tiresome.

According to Wikipedia, "Tom Tomorrow is the pen name of editorial cartoonist Dan Perkins."

Letterman isn't a politician. Letterman didn't pay blackmail money, like Senator Ensign. He didn't lie, like Governor Sanford. He didn't "cheat" on a wife, like they and John Edwards did. We haven't heard a peep of complaint, so far, from women who were involved with Letterman. The one he put through law school should be, I think, well satisfied, and it's Letterman's business what he gives her or does for her, outside the work place. If he gave her a better job or salary, it might be unfair to other employees... but they haven't complained so far, either.

So, nothing to see here... move along.

It's about time Democrats stopped kowtowing to the gun lobby.

A few main points:

a) Nobody knows whether they've bitten off more than they can chew, in buying a house. If they lose their job or get sick and lose their insurance, or if they're forced to move, for any reason, in a market downturn... they bit off more than they could chew. But there's no way to foresee these things. A mortgage is "safe" for a lender and buyer only if the buyer doesn't NEED the mortgage and has the price stashed in cash somewhere. It's silly to blame buyers who couldn't possibly know what the future would hold. OTOH, we probably shouldn't sign up for 30-year mortgages if we can't see a tenth that far ahead... and banks shouldn't offer them. I think 20-year mortgages should be the new norm, along with 10% down payments and a huge reduction in unjustified "closing costs" and "commissions".

b) Blankfein several times said that Goldman marks to market, the cure to these problems is to recognize the market value of assets, etc... But the market value of homes and stocks, two years ago, was nonsense. The market value of Japan's stock market, 25 years ago, was nonsense. The market value of things is (a) sometimes unknowable (as with those complex derivatives), (b) always a guess, and (c) not just sometimes, but USUALLY too high. Banks shouldn't mark to market; they should be more conservative than the market.

c) Blankfein and other CEOs, CFOs, and Wall Street market-makers are all, every one of them, inside traders. They know things we don't, and they make decisions that affect the price of their assets. They have a leverage advantage over the rest of us. The rich often get favored positions in IPOs, and they have tons of loot with which to buy our politicians.

d) A simple way to reduce that leverage would be to make the income tax more progressive. Our economy boomed in 1950-1963, when the top tax bracket varied from 91% to 92%. I agree with another poster who said we need new tax brackets. Maybe 40% over $300,000, 50% over a million, and 60% over five million. If that makes people less "motivated" to concoct risky money-making schemes... GOOD.

e) Corporate taxes should ALSO be progressive... to reduce incentives to become (or remain) "too big to fail".

If we did all that, the result could be stable markets and honest law-makers.

"But here, as the dowdy, stringy-haired, afterthought friend, she [Amanda Seyfried] mostly just cowers behind her spectacles."

That's a lot of crap, and so is most of the review.

(spoilers ahead)

Anita (Needy) takes charge as fast as one could expect, given the impossible premise. The movie begins and ends with her kicking butt and taking names. Anita settles everybody's hash, and Seyfried makes it believable.

Fox's dead-eyed performance after the change was as it should be. If she wasn't perfect before the change, neither was she mediocre. She did her job.

The lesbian kissing scene was not just gratuitous eye-candy; it also had a point. Jennifer's power and life-force derived, in part, from her connection to Anita. That's why Anita knew, at various points, what Jennifer was doing. Jennifer needed Anita. She described her turning so as to make herself seem completely innocent, hoping to keep Anita on her side. When that wasn't enough, she tried sex.

But Anita wasn't fooled, she wasn't weak, and she was NOT hiding behind her spectacles. She took back her BFF necklace, breaking their last connection, and only THEN could she kill the bitch. And she wasted no time doing just that.

It was a refreshing change from the typical horror movie, where the last girl alive is mostly lucky. Anita made her own luck, against all the odds.

In 1981, my father had pain in his arm, and the doctor treated it as bursitis for six weeks. It wasn't getting better, so he finally had an x-ray, and guess what? His arm was broken. Cancer had metastasized from his kidney and eaten the bone in two.

Doctors shortened his arm by two inches and pinned it back together. They removed his kidney and a few other things, I think. They irradiated him. They gave him interferon and toxic chemicals. We tried to encourage him; we talked about his grandchildren and we said they needed him. We talked about the woman across the hall who had a dozen deadly problems, and she just kept on keeping on. But all that was cruel.

He lived 102 days after the x-ray, and it was far too long.

Whatever the details may have been, Eddie was afraid and hurting for minutes, not hours. Or months. Or years. Try to be thankful for that. There's nothing more you can do.