bet there are a ton of football players who don't think plagarism is a 'scandal'.,

Whatever football players may think is irrelevant--they don't make their living by writing, that's for sure.

But to address your point, the crime in plagiarism is not in copying or repeating someone else's work--that's always been legal. The crime is in not attributing it to the author, and by extension claiming the work as your original idea. If you provide citations it's never a crime.

So, if the Pats show a video and say, "These are the D signals for the Dolphins", well, they've given credit to the right people. And then they can watch and learn. Like ever other team in the NFL has done since the invention of the 8mm camera, for crying out loud.

I won't argue the merits of a book I've never read, but i do find it curious that someone could argue with a straight face that the Fed has destroyed our economy "since it's creation", while also presiding over the financing of two world wars, several "police actions", a Cold War lasting half a century and the biggest bailout ever--the Marshall Plan--all while overseeing the creation of the most powerful and inclusive economy in human history. The Fed has been in existence since 1913--almost a century--coinciding with the highest standard of living ever achieved. The policies that created the middle class can hardly be the nemesis of the USA.

On the other hand, a poor energy policy married to an aggressive foreign policy and the resulting need to maintain the largest and most expensive military machine in the world might be. Our fiscal and monetary problems might not be so large if we weren't running a $7 trillion deficit rebuilding schools in Iraq while our own schools fall down around our kids. Bernanke need not spend hours wondering why inflation is rising despite using all the Fed's tricks to lower it, if he realizes that there is no way to shield the economy from the effects of $4 gas.

Yes, folks, Trickle-Down Economics do work--just not the way the Republicans claim it does.

As for gold--well, if we see some of the problems faced in this column, buying gold won't do you any good. You can't eat it, drink it or burn it in your furnace or your car. The most basic economies revolve around food, fuel, water access, clothing, salt and building materials. Everything else is extraneous; if you don't have these items, you don't have life.

The bad lending practices wouldn't have come into being without the spike in houseing prices.

Chicken and egg theory at work. It was the lending that allowed the housing bubble to continue for so long. Without the unusually larger pool or (poorly) qualified buyers subprime financing permitted, demand would not have been so great, leading to higher prices. The lending practices were around long, long before the bubble; they just didn't become mainstream until the supply of conforming buyers began to dry up ca. 2003.

There are, apparently, two recession proof industries in America: penile growth/sexual improvement for men, and anything to do with having a baby for women. Both fields are awash with easy money.

The E.O. minister, Mara Carfagna, is a former Miss Italy contestant and television showgirl. (Hopefully those weren't her only qualifications for the position.)

This, from a country that elected a porn star (Cicciolina) to Parliament. You're kidding, right?

That aside, the rest of the article reeks of diatribe.

Where is she arguing about the right of these people to assemble or demonstrate?? Seems like she just doesn't want to get behind it, or become associated with promoting a certain social agenda.

The group Arcigay also points out that 14 gays or lesbians have been murdered in Italy in the past two years and that gay people are "forced to hide their sexual orientation at home, at school and at work" -- which sounds to me like discrimination

Whatever. Do we know if these people were murdered because they were LGB, or just happened to be murdered victims who were "out"? Doesn't say. And seven people per year against an overall murder count of about 600 per year doesn't impress me that there's a purge against gays in Italia, or make a case that anyone has to hide anything.

From this article, it seems you're extrapolating from a minister's rather conservative social agenda that there's a conservative backlash against gays there. Maybe this minister is to E.O. what James Watt was to the Interior Department, but she's not exactly gutting her national trust, either.

And as for America looking good on this--who's our Cabinet-level Equal Opprtunity leader, again?

I'm not sure what you're getting at. Obviously, passing on the increased cost of fuel to the customer who packs for a weekend in Miami as if she's going on safari for three weeks will help the airlines keep their cost structure (somewhat) in line, but in the end, that plane, loaded with people and even minimal luggage, will need X gallons of jet fuel to fly from Boston to Orlando.

A better solution would be as the Ask the Pilot guy put it: fly fewer, larger bodied planes. Serving Miami ten times per day per carrier, with 2/3 of the plane empty, is worse for global warming than six full flights.

One last point: the previous poster who stated that the planet will take care of itself was correct; originally Earth went from a CO2 rich planet to one with a balance of O2-CO2 by evolving oxygen-dependent animals, all without our help. Our role as I see it is to use the natural processes we are aware of to restore the balance--replanting rainforests while cutting hydrocarbon emissions, and in the process developing renewal-sourced forms of combustion fuel.