There are other considerations as well. The physical location matters, as does the economic circumstance - in at least these ways:

1) The highest population growth right now is in the areas least able to supply a decent standard of living to all residents.

2) Somewhere around half the world's population lives within a meter or two of sea level*.

3) Fresh water is becoming an ever more precious resource. This will continue to deteriorate, as many rivers are supplied from glacial sources.

4) Many of the resources (see "water" above) now in the world are overused or misused, and there will inevitably be less of the non-renewable ones remaining to serve a population that is estimated to be around 9+ billion by 2050. (We are at approximately 6.5 billion now.)

5) By that same 2050, projections are that ocean food-fish stocks will be either extinct or seriously depleted. Many, if not most, of the people referenced in #2 above rely on fish as a protein source.

6) The amount of dislocation effected by half the world's population having to move or face potential inundation will create massive food, water, and housing crises, at the very least. Outright warfare, with its attendant human disasters, is not out of the question in some of those areas.

If anyone's read John Brunner's The Sheep Look Up, you've seen a rough look at the future.

* Sea level is expected to rise steadily over the remainder of the century, and outright inundation is not necessary to render many low-lying coastal areas uninhabitable. Tides and storm surges will do that, as will increasing salinity in many affected wetland areas.

Over at TPM Cafe, Charlie Savage has an interesting take on Bush's Supreme Court nominations:

...the Bush-Cheney legal team’s strategy of picking presidential lawyers to fill court vacancies has been an integral part of the groundwork it has laid for a long-term expansion of White House power.

Savage uses the term "Presidentialist" to describe Roberts and Alito (and Harriet Meyers!) - as in someone who will cede to the White House discretion in most matters involving presidential authority.

Go have a read - it's an intriguing look at what this White House has always been about - unfettered power exercised as it - and it alone - sees fit.

The housing crisis has been precipitated in large part by the inability of many people to meet their rising mortgage payments with stagnant wages and salaries. Those payments themselves are rising because of the endless string of refinancings, often with an adjustable rate as the vehicle.

Now, consumer spending is falling - because people are flat-out tapped. So corporate America is seeing, for the first time, a loss of retail customers. No demand = no need for products and services. No need for products and services = redundant staff job losses. The next step might well be even more foreclosures and there goes the last of the wedges holding things up.

This is ominous, no doubt of that.

Larry Craig is a hypocrite and a fool, and easily the current Republican poster child for appallingly bad judgment. Soliciting for public sex is outright wrong, no matter the object of the solicitation, and that's easily doubled when the "solicitor" is a sitting Senator. He deserves the opprobrium he gets, and get it he will.

All that said, I'm in favor of leaving his wife and family alone to the greatest extent possible. Her only bad judgment came in marrying him, and being adopted by him is something the kids likely had little if any say in, so for all of them I have very little to say.

Larry Craig entered a guilty plea to disorderly conduct, he is not a victim. As for sympathy for him, not now, not ever. Why does he want sympathy, when he's spent his whole political life working to criminalize the very sorts of actions that he was engaging in? Is that not the very textbook (Do as I say, not as I do!) definition of hypocrisy?

And as for Sen. Vitter, why are we waiting for Republican outrage? We know very well that's never going to happen, when a Democratic governor would be appointing his replacement. It's time to generate outrage ourselves. Letters to the editor, calls - and especially individually written letters (the form of communication elected officials take most seriously) - to our various Representatives and Senators, working it into discussions everywhere - the hypocrisy and cynicism of the Republicans in shielding Vitter when they threw Craig overboard, all these are fair tools we're underusing.

And Craig was soliciting for sex intended to take place in a public place - something not considered appropriate anywhere last time I looked. Straight, gay, or otherwise has nothing whatsoever to do with it.

As for Karsnia tasing the cyclist, first, it's utterly irrelevant to the discussion, and no one, repeat no one, can possibly make a connection in any rational way, and second, what the outcry over the "poor victim cyclist" neglected was this: In the real world in which most of us live, when a police officer tells you to do something, do it. Do it with dispatch, and do it without question. It's not a good idea to press the issue with the officer on the scene, as the results might not be to your liking. Why? Police officers are trained to not let their authority be questioned, and to take charge of an incident they are responding to, whatever its nature. They are trained to use "escalating force" to do so. Opposing them is generally regarded as a direct challenge, and met with further escalation.

The cyclist's wiser response would have been to listen to Karsnia, leave peaceably (and quickly), and then take it up with the airport PD supervisors in an official complaint afterward. Would he have gotten satisfaction? Maybe. Would he have gotten tased? Likely not. My reservoir of sympathy for the guy is very shallow indeed.