The amount of credit extended in the past seven years is out of balance with any list of assets backing it up. When you add up loans, derivitives, swaps, and commericial paper the numbers are astronomical. Everyone in power was able to fleece the system because everything companies made could be blown on compensation, profit-sharing, bonuses, and dividends because operating budgets were largely made up of borrowed money. Net investment in plant and equipment had to have been negative for some time before the economy actually tanked. The big global banks were the nexus of this vast overleveraging. If they fail, more than just the normal operations of the market go down--a whole global economy collapses (and don't kid yourselves, Main Street gets buried in the avalanche).

What we have to do is dismantle that economy in stages and make DAMN SURE that the losses accrue to those who caused the problem. The Obama people understand the first part, I think, but are loathe to push through the second. Their inability to even imagine making the miscreants pay will, I fear, be the undoing of all their other rational efforts to bring us out of this crisis.

He was elected to do the people's business and carry out his oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States! Why is this so fucking cloudy in people's minds?If he has no desire to be a dictator, then hand back the powers, period. All you people who told me what a Constitutional "scholar" he is, can you explain his inability to read the friggin' thing and see that he has no such powers as he now claims for himself? Forget about how smart he supposeldly is; how about him acting honorably? How about him taking his Oath seriously? How about some real guts and leadership! Expose the crimes, enforce the laws: that's what we need from this President, not horseshit "hope" and spineless "bipartisanship."

A couple of months back, I heard a spate of rumors that many government officials were just waiting for Bush to leave office so that they could spill the beans on what they saw as criminal wrongdoing and abhorent behavior under the last regime.

I'm still waiting for these people to come forward. And I'm afraid that the Obama Administration is not sending them the right message. With so many government documents lost already, and Establishment loyalists I'm sure getting rid of more as we speak, it will take the concerted efforts of several credible whistleblowers to get to the bottom of what happened over th last eight years. Cross your fingers that they have not been scared into silence (or even, we might speculate, been silenced).

We know that CIA officials at one point were weird or perverted enough to tape rendition victims being tortured in third party prisons. But I seriously doubt if much of the evidence of wrongdoing survived the Bush-Obama Interregnum. Like Mai Li (forgive me fogetting proper spelling there) we need a few angry GIs or Spooks to step forward and tell what they saw.

Those men had incredible guts, but also the US Army was tupid enough to bring some of them up on charges for tryting to stop the massacre! So, they had an incentive to talk as well. Those guys who bore witness to truth got nothing from a less than grateful country; they were ignored, and their tales shrugged off as "an isolated incident." Would Congress today act any differently? Will Obama cough up the secret documents if any have survived the shredder and the delete button? We'll know if the nation is back on track or not as and when those questions get answered.

Hitler might have won that one, or fought the world to a draw. He had the power of the world's second most potent military machine at his beck and call. He was able to start a war that killed 54 million people, and drive the Jews of Europe towards extinction. The Taliban shitheads and all their allies can't come close to that.

As someone who thinks Sharia law is oppressive nonsense and that the Pakistani government is obliged to fight it (it's their country and their people and their fight, not ours) I am all in favor of reminding people how lousy things are in large swaths of the Muslim world (including most of Afghanistan, a country we supposedly "liberated" ho-ho), but just as Christians had to stop massacring each other and buring witches at the stake after 1648, Muslims will have to stumble towards modernity at their own pace and in their own way. I'd say if we told Pakistani Intelligence and the pakistani military that we were cutting off all their military aid and monitoring their other aid and loans like hawks if they didn't push back against this nastiness, they'd get off their duffs and suppress these throwbacks.

...to fight yet another war against by far the most formidable enemy we will have faced since Vietnam? Doesn't anyone anymore read Clausewitz? Don't they get it that no war can be won unless you have a clear political goal that can be attained at a cost worth paying? By Perle's own logic, won't the Iranians be forced to retaliate by any means at their disposal if their people are being bombed and killed by foreigners? What does he imagine they will do, shit themselves and cry "uncle"? If they are the fanatics he claims they are, won't they strike back with everythign they've got and resort to any nasty tactic they can in retaliation for an attack on their land and people?

A whole swath of the American foreign policy establishment is either derranged or pathological.