And whenever she's home you can smell the stupidity from here if the wind is in the right direction. I'm ashamed that she represents Minnesota in any way. Most of us, here, are far more aware and far more intelligent that Mickey, although if our governor gets his way, he'll be sure the state's schools are only able to turn out more Mickey's.

Perhaps it will help those of you who don't live here to forgive us if you realize that the district from which she was elected was heavily gerrymandered by the Republicans to create a place where someone with her ignorant knee-jerk, protect the rich, oppose abortion and gay marriage-type of conservatism could be guaranteed a seat.

But beyond that, when it comes to our current class of corporate/banking/financial executives there's an anecdote I find illustrative: There's a big cocktail party at Martha's Vineyard. Joseph Heller, the author of "Catch 22" and a friend are on the way up to the house and the friend says to Heller, "You see our host over there? He's a hedge fund manager. He made more money yesterday than you made on all the books you've ever published". Joe pauses for a moment, then replies, "Yeah, but ya know, I have something he'll never have... enough."

It is an as-yet-unnamed (except in terms of sex) psychological dysfunction not to be able to find satisfaction in anything. (Perhaps the new "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual" will give the economic form of this a name?) Sadly, our current crop of business/economic leaders and their GOP supporters all seem to be aimed in the direction of vainly seeking satisfaction in money. They'll never have enough, but since they don't feel satisfied yet, they feel justified in doing whatever they feel they need to do to get more, even if that means destroying the nation, even the planet in continuing to chase after the satisfaction they'll never feel by doing what they're doing.

Finally, I can't help but wonder if one of the issues at hand, which our economic/political theories are not even close to being able to comprehend, let alone deal with, is one raised by my Industrial Technology 101 teacher way back in the early 70's: "What will we do when we no longer NEED every one to work in order to accomplish everything that we need to accomplish."

If we reach that age, which, theoretically should be a time of LESS work for everyone, a time when people can work fewer hours and still enjoy all the benefits of an advanced society, how will we compensate the people we don't need to work enough to "earn" that compensation?

The days are rapidly approaching when we'll have to deal with this issue. Does anyone have a theory for how to deal with it? Miltonian's? Keynsian's? Any ideas?

Surely you were not responsible because you expected to be rewarded for it beyond the comfort of your own financial security and stability. No matter how responsible you were, if the rest of the nation is allowed to go down the tubes, say if all the other houses in your neighborhood go into foreclosure, they'll be taking you down with them. So you will be rewarded in an indirect way in that your responsibility will win you what you expected and, indeed, what it should instead of being sucked down into the black hole of default with your less responsible neighbors.

Meanwhile, it will be interesting to see if offering future penalties for bad behavior and rewards for good behavior will be enough to overcome the entrenched mild (or in some cases, quite severe) oppositional/defiant disorder exhibited by so many of our current financial leaders who have sometimes seemed so determined not to let anyone tell them what to do that they would rather commit institutional suicide than change their policies toward borrowers.

Next question: When do we get a similar approach to the credit card default crisis looming on the horizon?

Which of course resonates with the extreme, impotent anger of the far right at this point. Of course they loved it. We can only hope that when it inspires one of them to do as it encourages them to do, the Secret Service will be at their best.

As for Bush being compared with a chimp, it was not racist because there has never been a history of such derisive comparisons of white people to chimps. It was apt, however, since an entire collection of his facial expressions did, indeed, seem to appear to be simian in nature. There was a noticeable resemblance between the two.

This cartoon is clearly racist, however, since black people have been derisively referred to as "monkeys" or "porch monkeys" for at least a century.

Again, the dangerous thing about such a cartoon is that it adds a certain credibility and implies a certain acceptability toward doing violence to those in the government who have done things with which you vehemently disagree.

In "civilized" society, we do not do such things, but this cartoonist is clearly stating that it's OK to substitute violence for civilization.

I'd like to hear your PERFECT solution, but just one little thing to bear in mind: If we nationalize the banks, then the taxpayers are on the hook for the write downs of the toxic assets. I suspect that approach would be far more expensive to us taxpayers than Obama's plan.

Personally, I'd rather try this very good plan than wait until everyone agrees on a PERFECT alternative (which of course will happen when we have exceedingly cold weather in what is traditionally thought to be a singularly warm place).