You said: if they're contractually obligated to pay the money out to their people, then they have to do so.

Yeah whatever. To borrow from Glenn Greenwald's latest:

Larry Summers, Sunday, on AIG’s payment of executive bonuses:

We are a country of law. There are contracts. The government cannot just abrogate contracts. Every legal step possible to limit those bonuses is being taken by Secretary Geithner and by the Federal Reserve system.

Associated Press, February 18, 2009:

The United Auto Workers’ deal with Detroit’s three automakers limits overtime, changes work rules, cuts lump-sum cash bonuses and gets rid of cost-of-living pay raises to help reduce the companies’ labor costs, people briefed on the agreement said today.

The UAW announced Tuesday that it reached the tentative agreement with General Motors Corp., Chrysler LLC and Ford Motor Co. over contract concessions, as GM and Chrysler sent plans to the Treasury Department asking for a total of $39 billion in government financing to help them survive.

Concessions with the union are a condition of the $17.4 billion in government loans that the automakers have received so far.

You either did not read or did not understand the jist of my last post.

I'm surprised that the article doesn't mention my fave Natasha Richardson film, The White Countess. She and Ralph Fiennes made a stunning pair. Also loved her in The Handmaid's Tale.

I loved him on Veronica Mars too! I may have to watch that episode again now.

Paul Rudd is adorable and he's got great comic timing. For once, I am in total agreement with Zacharek.

I'm one hundred percent with you. I love thrillers and rom-coms, but Julia Roberts is the kiss of death for me, the female equivalent of Nicholas Cage, but without the halcyon days (Vampire's Kiss, Moonstruck).

At the age of 45 my mother was poor, working 10 hour days at two jobs, completing a masters degree, and raising an immensly difficult child, the baby in our family. She was also morbidly obese. Through sheer willpower, a mix of excercise and low carbing, she lost almost 100 pounds over a year and 1/2. She told me many years later that she would go into the woods to exercise in secret so that nobody could see how difficult it was for her just to move. She would watch my Dad eat toast and greasy eggs for breakfast, and cry at the breakfast table.

It's been 11 years and she's kept it off. She's still working like an SOB but the baby bro is raised and turned out great.

I've got zero admiration for people who manage to lose weight with the help of a full-time staff of cheerleaders, hottie trainers, and personal chefs. Try resisting carbs when you can't figure out how to pay the phone bill. Try doing intense workouts twice daily when you work two shifts in retail!

Basically, I guess it's a sign of the times, but stars, and CEOs and other privileged people have begun to provoke deep angry scorn in me. We gave them this power I guess, but it still disgusts me.

You're not the only one to get a pot-hangover, though you may be more sensitive than most. In my experience, smoking too much of the green stuff will leave most people with a fuzzy-head the next day.

Brietbart and his ilk are immune to reality. The clips in this article read like topsy-turvy satire.

There is no valid point to address.

If I tell you that we should eat pizza for dinner tonight, and you say "but eating foie gras is what made us obese in the first place!", you've not made a point worth responding to.

Fiscal recklessness did cause this mess in the first place - but that recklessness was not state spending on social programs and eduction, it was a different kind of thing altogether.

Spending money on fixing up disgraceful schools that are helping to hamper the development of impoverished students is not fiscal recklessness. To imply that it is fiscal recklesssness to fix leaking school roofs, to buy up to date textbooks, to heat classrooms (I'm not kidding, these kids are wearing mitts at school!!)...well, that's so crazy as to be undeserving of a response. Why I've bothered to respond to you is anybody's guess.

Yes, accepting a stimulus package to fix up schools will cause more debt, but remember two things:

1. debt is the result, not the cause of this problem. The cause was massive deregulation, large scale corporate greed, and short-horizon thinking which lead to a failure to risk-manage.

1. Investing in education is the opposite of greed. It is the opposite of short-horizon thinking, it is the ultimate risk-management, because it pays dividends that are slow growing, but so large. If S.C. wants to enhance its security and wealth in the future, it must start educating its students.

Why are you, as a country, sending these beautiful young men and women off to die? It's been too long, GW Bush is gone. End it. Go AWOL. Come up to Canada.

There's only so much abuse people should have to take from their own government. You all got bamboozled or press-ganged (depending on how credulous you were) into this stupid fucking war. It's not legitimate and its not right.

You said:

For instance: in the Netherlands, fewer than one in ten mothers with underage children have a full-time job. 40% have no job or work fewer than 12 hours a week. The easier you make for women with kids to not work, the more that becomes the assumption culturally.

Well, that may be true, in that it seems like, given the option, many women would like to stay home and spend time raising their children (while working part-time in many cases). Maybe that's a good thing - having that choice, at least.

Don't get me wrong, I work in a high-pressure professional job, and by choice. The women around me employ nannies and babysitters, but I don't think all women want to be away from their children for long days.