There are more choices than the repug's "no taxes or regulation" and Obama's "give money to corporations and all will work out". Both of these choices are devastating to the ever-vanishing middle class.

When will we start talking about direct stimulus. Locally, all of our stimulus money is going to our wealthiest five families and a couple of foreign corporations. I would much rather see these road projects done by directly-hired government employees as was done by the WPA and CCC during the previous depression. Although Obama is making a small move in this direction, we also need some way of creating an educated society that doesn't get there by either being born rich enough to go to college or by taking on six-figure debt. Maybe Nader was right and we truly have the evil of the two lessers.

The very few perpetrators of domestic violence that I have known don't actually think of themselves as violent. In fact, they would not label what goes on in their homes as domestic violence. It seems crazy, but they always have some rational (to them) excuse for what they do. I don't think they would see themselves in these flyers and therefore they would be unlikely to take it out on their victims.

"If Nokia didn't provide the monitoring technology, someone else would have."

Yes, and if I didn't torture him then someone else would have.

Who can blame him for decrying the slaughter and consumption of pigs? After all, some of them may be his near relatives.

When I was in grad. school at a U.C. campus several of my fellow students decided (late one night in the lab) that CA would have much more money to do useful things if we sentenced our worst criminals to grad. school instead of prison. We later realized that very few of them would willingly trade a prison cell for our lifestyles.

It looks like the long-running right-wing plan to make education so expensive that only the children of wealthy families can afford it has not worked well enough. Some of those smart poor kids still managed to get quality educations (and degrees) through grants, scholarships and loans. Part two of creating a permanent plutocracy is now being implemented: make the universities that po' folks attend so crappy that their degrees are considered worthless compared to those from private universities.

The GOP are not so crass as to use a bullet. Expect a small plane crash or some sort of automobile "accident". These things just happen all the time. Who would suspect?

Why can't everyone see how important it is for only rich folk to have access to health care. If we allow poor or middle class people access to high quality health care, how will we be able to tell the difference between "us" and "them"?

"If the recession isn't over, it will be soon. The question now is what next?"

Just like the early '30s, what's next is the rest of the Great Depression, version 2. We're seeing a small pseudo-recovery largely led by inventory adjustments (overlarge cuts initially leading to a need for an apparent increase to get back to proper inventory/sales levels). I hope I am wrong, but this situation looks quite grim.

My mother-in-law went from a 70-year-old woman whose typical day consisted of a 5 mile walk through the hills followed by a dance class, an 8000 yard swim and yoga class to someone who could not stay vertical throughout the day over the course of two weeks. When she was taken to the local hospital they insisted on entering into her history that she was a "70 year-old hysterical woman with a history of high blood pressure". One out of three isn't bad if you are hitting a baseball; these guys were pathetic. They wanted to just put her on meds for high blood pressure and leave it at that.

Fortunately, we then took her to the U.C. Davis Medical Center. Within twenty hours they had placed two stents to deal with 99% occlusions of coronary arteries and performed an angioplasty. Had we left her with the poorly trained physicians at her local hospital, she would be dead now. I feel very strongly that the only place one should go for serious medical issues is a teaching hospital.

Is it really a Keynesian stimulus if it only goes to the wealthiest 2%? Had we EMPLOYED people to make things and build things rather than just transfer money to the same opportunists and wealthy families who got us here, I would applaud the stimulus. As it stands, we are seeing a continuing transfer of wealth from the lower/middle class to the ruling class and Summers fresh fingerprints are all over this crime scene.

So, we are supposed to rejoice that we are using smaller shovels to dig our collective grave? Christ on a crutch! Ford is saying the most popular car being purchased to replace a "clunker" gets 27 mpg while my '84 pickup gets 30 (when I find a need to drive it, which is far less than once a year). The cars and SUVs being purchased under the C4C program will likely never even pay off their embodied carbon costs before they are abandoned in the face of the end of cheap oil. I would rather pay people to commit to car-free lifestyles so we can begin to get some folks prepared for our obvious future.