Roosevelt took power almost four years after the Crash. And Hoover essentially tried to deal with the catastrophe the same way that Mitch McConnell and Rush Limbaugh want to now: he slashed the budget in a failed attempt to balance it, cut taxes, and refused any direct aid to the people, because it was, in his estimation, a slight against state's rights. So by the time FDR showed up, unemployment was around 30%, the soup lines were astonishingly long, people were starving in the streets, and the banks had already failed. So FDR found that the interests that had been firmly in charge for so long basically had no political clout left. So a new president could push through anything he wanted, and there was nothing the hated GOP could do to stop it. FDR's victory in Congress was stunning. The GOP was there as a rump party.

Now, however, the zombie banks still have not been allowed to fail. Hoover let them do that last time.

I don't think he or I know how to construct this business model, but he's absolutely right about one thing: it takes money to commit actual journalism. Opinion pieces, or political blogs, can be made to make money though advertising. It's modest, and you can't put bureaus all over the world, and stringers, and so on, without money.

All this new/old media sockdologizing is one thing; it's true enough, as far as it goes, but like so many things, it just doen't go very far at all. I'm sorry, but the HuffPost is as shallow as a saucer of milk. Where the long articles explaining who's who in the health care lobbies? Where's the investigative pieces, aside from Seymour Hersh, that really blow the town up? Who's doing that? The New Yorker pays for Sy because people pay for the glossy paper, and they make a lot in ads, too. If that goes away, the Kindle is no substitute. The web serves up marvelous opinion, but it's very, very shallow in delivering fact.

@juliebird Pelosi may (or may not) have been informed that the Bush administration was acting like Nazis, but she was also under oath not to divulge what she was told in those briefing. Of course, you're compelled to excuse these crimes, or discount them as partisan games. I'd love that to be true. It is not.

I know it will be tough. I know it will not result in the peace and love atmosphere that Obama seems to be hooked on. But Cheney and those who committed these crimes against the constitution have to be condemned in law and on the national stage.

We're now seeing reason 5,976 for not approving torture: it is addictive, and it creates a class of torturers. I guess this is also the price for promoting all those South American regimes that trained their officers in the School for the Americas. Some school. Some America.

They say he's popular. He actually used to be funny, once upon a time, when we went on the Letterman show back in the day when Dave was the mad genius revolving the show 360 degrees around the hour and talking to the man under the floor. Leno had lots of funny guest appearances, with Dave feeding him the rapid-fire straight lines and cracking up on cue. He was kind of the best of the old school of comedy. Seemed like he was trying to be the kinder, gentler Rickles.

When he got into his incredibly lazy, gag-writer zone with the Tonight Show, it was all over for him as a comic.

The Telegraph is a Wacky World Week kind of source.

Seymour Hersh is a great man who often brings us startling things that shouldn't be true. He occasionally errs, too. And more often than he does, the apparatus of National Security looks around to discredit him. He's right, and importantly so, more often than he's right.

Chris Suellentrop is a timid little Slate/NYT weenie who's never met a fact he understands the importance of.

Correction: Hersh is right more often than he's wrong.