I would.

There comes a point when these amounts of money metamorphose from simply absurd to obnoxiously obscene. Particularly in view of the fact that these companies were foundering at the time of these expenditures. And especially when viewed in the light that the source of some of this lucre is the taxpayer.

To paraphrase Jack Nicholson from Chinatown-- "How much better can you eat? What can you buy that you can't already afford?"

Nothing but the admiration and envy of their equally ridiculously wealthy coequals... and their serfs.

Should executives be compensated for the efforts? Indubitably. But whose efforts are worthy of these vast sums? The CEO busy projecting future profit margins and tallying his stock options while consulting an army of decorators about his latest office makeover or the laborer who actually hews the wood, hammers the metal, carries the load and delivers the goods?

And in the meantime, who goes without to support the few in their luxury?

The GOP version of Harry Reid.

All blather and no spine.

The best part of the story. Genghis Khan Scottish Whiskey!

One drink and you can pillage a village.

The perpetually spineless Harry Reid is a disaster for Democrats and needs to be replaced as quickly as possible. Weak-kneed and feckless, he has been the poster child of what's gone wrong with our party.

What the ankle-biters of the right, these lapdogs of privilege, have to say? We won. It's our agenda to reverse the course of eight long years of corruption, mismanagement and neglect that brought our country to this pass. They can vote for or against it and it won't matter one whit.

Stop dicking around with them and their marginilized, discredited worldview and pass the damn bill already.

I always assumed he was gay.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

We could have 75 seats in the Senate and it wouldn't matter. Harry Reid couldn't lead his way out of a paper bag if you showed him the opening. He'd find some way to screw it up while simultaneously making the Republicans look canny and the Democrats appear vacillating.

Having these idiotic frat boys chortling publicly over this silliness makes for a great gift to the Democratic Party.

Which may explain in part why the fortunes of the GOP are plumbing such new depths...

Everytime I think the Republican Party has reached it's nadir, they manage to go one better.

This bonehead will wind up being Sarah Palin's VP candidate in 2012.

That's right, the Dumb and Dumber ticket. No ideas, no hope, no clue.

Like a previous poster, I wouldn't mind seeing Howard Dean get the nod for this position.

I know someone has already posted a link to the White House email. There's also a Facebook community to that end:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=65001140420

The Beltway rallies to one of it's own. Never mind the warts, blemishes, conflicts of interest and questions of integrity. He was one of them, so they mourn him like a paragon of virtue instead of what he was-- failed hack, industry lobbyist, Washington insider, anathema to change.

Let them say whatever they like. Good riddance, says I.

"I'm tired of the ideological debate in the Democratic party over whether we ought to have a single payer or something else. Because when the Democrats fight among each other, the Republicans and their special interests kill the bill, and the 42 million people with no health insurance go for another 10 years without health insurance. That's not what we want! We're going to end up with a comprehensive plan that will pass, insure everybody, and then we're going to have a big fight about how to reform the health care system, but we're not going to keep those 42 million people out in the cold anymore.

What we ought to be demanding as Democrats, is what Harry Truman put in the 1948 Democratic Party platform: health insurance that covers everybody, just like they have in Germany, France, Costa Rica, Japan, Ireland, and Italy! Every single industrialized country on the face of the earth has health insurance for all of its people. Why can't we have what all those countries have?"

This is unbelievable. Your taxpayer dollars at work:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28999671/

WTF is wrong with these people?

You are absolutely right about Daschle. Health care reform is too important to be left to a failed hack with intimate industry/Big Pharma connections.

And it's high time too that the class war which the Repubs have surreptitiously waged on the working and middle classes for the last thirty years has been called exactly what it is. Among the decidedly middle class folks I talk with on a daily basis, the resentment is palpable and runs very, very deep.

They've made this country the pillar of democracy that it is today.

Okay, maybe not a pillar.

Maybe not so democratic, either....

It's certainly arguable that if Cheney and his tool W hadn't been elected (then again, it's arguable that they weren't actually elected), then 9/11 would have been avoided.

Ergo, the terrorist "problem"-- self-fulfilling prophecy, really-- wouldn't have been conflated and exploited (and, ultimately, like everything else in W's administration, bungled) and Al Qaeda wouldn't be half the worldwide threat that it is today.

Hell, even if we assume that 9/11 was bound to happen no matter what, it was the W administration's duty, responsibility and solemn promise to hunt down and "bring to justice" those responsible. Refresh my memory, Dick, how'd that work out?

So, upon review of your record, Dick, why on earth should we take anything you say seriously? Conversely, please explain why we shouldn't we be greeting you with a hail of thrown shoes at you whenever you appear. Dick.