Considering that the first thing Obama did before even taking office was help prevent the global economic collapse, it's actually kind of swell that we are merely facing a long, painful recession, a moderately conceived health care reform bill, an (any) attempt at cap and trade and the practical difficulties of cleaning up Bush and Co's mess in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But hey ... he was supposed to put a chicken in every pot and usher in peace on earth in six months. So of course he's a failure and a corporatist and a bad bad man.

Personally the more the big massive masses hate him, the more I like him, because I liked the fact that he was a pragmatist and an incrementalist in the first place. I absolutely love that he actually took his time figuring out what to do about Afghanistan instead of naively stampeding out. I absolutely love that he has sought a way of reforming health care that did not nationalize 1/6 of our economy and destroying even more jobs willy-nilly. I love that he's being careful. I love that he went to China and came home and started talking about deficit reduction because he saw that our co-dependent relationship with China is scary.

Also the big massive masses all wuved Bush and the war in Iraq, so I'll take my own judgment over theirs any day.

If you are female and adult and breathing, there is contempt for you. It doesn't matter if you are married or single, child free or a mother, a working mom or a stay-at-home mom, a corporate drone earning a paycheck, or an ambitious striver. You are bad. You are "entitled". You are Breathing While Female. That's what you are doing wrong.

There will always be someone signing up to tell you, with bar charts and graphs and Bible Verses and statistics, that you are doing something wrong.

The only answer if you are Breathing While Female is to say fuck em and live your life.

The letter writers today are seriously satire-challenged.

Oh, but consider this: This announcement comes while the president is on the plane back from China.

Who holds such a significant piece of our debt that we have no leverage with them anymore? China.

That's the difference between now and 1937. Prior to the 80s, most US debt was held by American citizens. Can you imagine the mid 20th century if the German government held a large portion of the the US debt then?

Oh, you are right. I am referring quaintly to an old-fashioned budget reckoning that separates social security into its own funding stream. We've been raiding the Social Security trust fund for so long that this is not the way to look at it anymore.

Your point about having to cut spending and raise taxes are well taken, but merely cutting spending on entitlements is tricky and must be done very carefully because there will be an economic cost to the rest of us increased poverty among seniors one way or another. It doesn't do any good to cut benefits federally if the states and local governments end up taking up the slack.

I'd be a little more interested in cutting or at least revamping our military commitments. Okay, I get why Afghanistan is important, but who are we defending Germany from exactly? The other Germany? The USSR? And for how long?

You are using the terms interchangeably, and while no doubt deficit reduction would ultimately make debt reduction possible, they are not the same at all.

The deficit is the gap between the amount of revenue taken in and the amount of spending. The debt is the money we borrowed to fill the gap in the deficit.

Reducing the debt is a huge undertaking. Reducing the deficit is much easier. Although they are linked ... the biggest single expense on the government's books is in fact INTEREST on the national debt. Not paying it back. Just the interest.

That's right. We've spent 30 years putting the government on our credit card.

Now there is one HIGHLY unpopular way to reduce the deficit and/or debt and create jobs programs at the same time: Raise Taxes. (Since any government jobs created would be subject to income tax, you might end up with more revenue anyway.)

But sooner or later some president or other will have to have the balls to raise taxes and pay down the debt anyway. This nonsense that started with Reagan that we can get something for nothing forever was just that: nonsense.

The tax increase to pay off the national debt is inevitable and anyone who tells you differently is a L-I-A-R ... or old enough that they think they won't live to see it.

When they saw ordinary Westerners trying to uphold human rights, their jihadism began to stutter. Almost all of them said that they doubted their Islamism when they saw a million non-Muslims march in London to oppose the Iraq War: "How could we demonise people who obviously opposed aggression against Muslims?" asks Hadiya.

Gosh!

As someone who marched against the war here in the US, I'm really touched by this. We could not move our own government, but if even a handful of extremists lay down arms because of the anti-war protests, then it was not nearly as futile a gesture as it appeared! It meant something to someone!

Abortion is only a sin in the third person, as in their abortion. Or the second person, as in your abortion.

Abortion in the first person is "I don't really believe in this but ..."