What could be more Kafka-esque than a big bank? They have teams of people whose only goal in life is to screw you. They charge you for using another bank's ATM on top of the fee that bank's ATM charged you. They charge you if you fall below the minimum balance. A friend of mine owas once asked to pay a deposit fee - a fee for depositing a check into his account at the bank.

In contrast, my local DMV in Philly pretty much tells you what you owe and you pay it. For that matter, our state-run liquor monopoly is nothing if not efficient. (Although it would be nice to buy wine from a wine lover instead of a civil servant who only drinks mango schnapps and failed the exam to be a postal worker.)

Why exactly does PBS run these stupid infomercials during pledge drives instead of running the shows their audience is actually sponsoring as NPR does?

As a middle class person, I can't really cut my retail sales all that much. The plaster in my wall collapsed, I bought spackle. My cutting board split in half, I got another one. I bought a pair of pants on sale because I needed a pair of presentable pants. Other than that, I buy food. Honestly my consumer spending has hardly declined because I don't have any monry and there is nothing I want to buy anyway.

clearly, we should all just be teenaged parents. i mean, high school and college are a lot more flexible than entry level jobs, so what better time?

With that many extra men, they are going to need to start a war to kill some off. And with that much cannon fodder, they will be unstoppable. Alternatively, they will take all the women in Cambodia and Vietnam and they will have a big war.

Please leave. Take Florida with you.

Specter has a 100% chance of losing the primary and Toomey has a 100% chance of losing the general. As a Philadelphian, I will miss having a city resident with Specter's level of power. And as our local gov't (and that of many other cities) demonstrates, one-party rule is not good. We need a second party that's not insane.

I'm 6' tall, and to me, the only thing more tortuous than an airline seat is an airline seat with a scumbag in front of me reclining his seat into my face. I would rather stand. I would rather be drugged and stowed in the overhead compartment. In fact, with the added humiliation of airport security, a FedEx shipping container seems like the best way to fly.

Obama doesn't want nationalization because he doesn't want the buck stopping with him. And really, who would? If the feds own enough voting shares to run a company, they have to take responsibility for the bank's actions - every time a bank turns down a little old lady's mortgage application, Barack Obama would be the guy in charge. Plus, how do you responsibly run banks that are competing with each other if you run them all? It's like being the CEO of General Motors, canibalizing Pontiac's market share for the benefit of Chevy.

The difference between 1994 and today is that the groups that fought Hillarcare want to see a healthcare overhaul now. Wal Mart wants it. GM is literally dying for it. Even the insurance companies want some kind of overhaul, because they are losing customers and willing to cut their margins in order to get their fangs into the 40 million uninsured people in this country.

The GOP used to be the party of big business, but if they don't come up with a workable plan, they will lose that constituency and that will be the end of their party.

Why, with all this technology, are we still worrying about employing everybody at 40 hours a week? Just as the lords and ladies once enjoyed liesure on the backs of their serfs, we should be kicking back and enjoying life ont he backs of our technology. 10 hour work week, anybody?

face it - mankind is going to burn every drop of recoverable oil and gas and most of the coal. Then we will die. There is absolutely no getting around that, unless someone invents an incredibly cheap, safe and reliable source of unlimited power.

Geithner is an industry insider and his goal is to fix the old system. The old system is beyond repair, but there is absolutely no political support for remaking our economy. It's a lose-lose situation for Geithner and Obama. The bottom line is, moving imaginary money around was 25% of our economy. We outsourced real production, and now we are locked in a cycle of collapse.

Disbar them at least - I mean, if telling your client to break international laws that our own courts have upheld int he past isn't grounds for disbarment, i don't know what is.

Mortgage-backed securities only became "toxic assets" because their value was assumed to be "safe as houses" in a perpetually rising real estate market. The way the assets were collateralized exacerbated the problem.

In contrast, credit card debt has never been backed by assets, so it's value is already based on some risk of default.

We can't have social welfare in America because it would help black people. That has been the backbone of our politics for 40-50 years. Simple as that.

It's like that George Carlin quote. "The rich get all the money, the middle class does all the work, and the poor are there to scare the shit out of the middle class."

Early puberty would not be such a problem if we had not also delayed social maturity. In middle class society, we have extended adolescence to age 30. 200 years ago, a girl matured physically at 17, got married at 18, had kids at 19. Now a girl matures physically at 13, has her first sexual experience at 16, gets married at 30 and has kids at 33.