Following Cashill's brilliant analysis, I have just proved that I am also Barack Obama -- or that Bill Ayers is me -- or something. After all, I have also quoted the Sandburg poem saying "hog butcher to the world" (hardly alone there -- Google Books finds the quote with "to" in 605 works), and have misspelled Franz, sorry, Frantz Fanon's name.

But most amazing is the revelation that the famous editor and literary critic Jack Cashill had to look up the word 'baleful.' Apparently he never got around to reading Dickens (Bleak House), Milton (Paradise Lost), or Shakespeare (Henry VI, Romeo and Juliet).

Or maybe Obama -- and/or Ayers -- wrote those works, too?

If the Obama socialists succeed in putting our police forces under government control, what's next -- nationalizing the armed forces? Glenn Beck, save us!

Apparently a coup in Honduras -- the first coup in a Central American country in more than two decades -- doesn't count as news.

Nothing to see here, just move along.

It is possible to farm fish responsibly and in an ecologically sustainable way. But it costs more. This year I read a thesis by a student at the University of Michigan that detailed the vast ecological damage being caused by salmon farms in Chile (the main source of salmon in the US, and the main reason why salmon today costs a small fraction of what it did twenty years ago). Some of the major problems:

* Runoff from the vast amounts of salmon waste, which creates dead zones in the southern Pacific.

* The usual problem of monocultures anywhere, the salmon concentrated in a small area are susceptible to disease (especially lice -- who knew) and are treated with vast quantities of antibiotics, which also run off and do their usual damage.

* Salmon are carnivorous fish, so farming them requires enormous quantities of other fish as feed. You may think that you are sparing the wild sea fish by eating farmed salmon, but in fact every pound of farmed salmon was created by devouring eight or ten pounds of wild sea fish caught by long-net trawlers, the very mechanism that is scouring the oceans clean of all fish life.

* Salmon farms in the ocean can and do get free, with the result that North Atlantic fish stock (the kind grown in farms) are taking over what is left of the ecosystem of southern Pacific oceans.

Etc. It is important to note that each of these problems can be and has been solved in Norway, which operates model salmon fisheries (keeping the salmons in ponds isolated from each other and the ocean, feeding them with protein from non-wild sources, etc.) But that costs more. The irony is that the ecologically devastating Chilean salmon farms are owned and operated by... Norwegians. Oh well.

The upshot of all this is that I have simply opted to give up all fish "for the time being" -- that is, until the oceans recover. Though the rate we're going, that probably won't be for a long, long time.

It is worth remembering that the Catholic Church has been around for a few years. And that it has a better institutional memory than, say, any institution in the United States.

Which is to say that the Popes were around when the modern political philosophy of Liberalism first arose -- as the primary ideological backer of modern capitalism. Since at least the mid-nineteenth century, the Church has stood in opposition to both socialism and liberal (or as we say nowadays, "neoliberal") capitalism.

Pope Benedict's encyclical against the excesses of capitalism may be better argued than some Church documents, but it is nothing particularly new -- and, welcome as it may be, it is definitely not "liberal" in any meaningful sense of the word.

The only question that cries out for an answer is the one that Max Weber took on with at best mixed success a century ago: why is it that American Christianity, for a long time alone of all the Christianities of the world, made peace with the "greed is good," individualistic economic philosophy of capitalism?

Herewith, the complaint of someone with an older computer...

Reason #2 to switch from Windows to anything that comes along: the excruciatingly long, two-part start up time (turn on computer, wait anywhere from 1 to 5 minutes for Stage 1 to finish, then log in and wait another 1 to 5 minutes for the dang thing to start working -- and god forbid you should invoke the wrong program during the undefined start-up time, because then the system will freeze and you'll have to start all over again).

Reason #1 to switch from Windows to anything else: the excruciatingly long shut down time (press "Start", wait several seconds for Windows to realize that you're calling it, press "shut down," wait several more seconds for Windows to struggle awake again, confirm "Shut down," then wait for up to 5 minutes for the machine to shut down -- and god forbid you walk away in the meantime, thinking it has shut down, only to come back a day later and discover that the shut down process hit some undefined snag and kept your machine running the whole time...)

Reasons #1 through 5 for sticking with Windows in spite of it all: I have all my programs and all my files on it; I know all the commands by heart; my work forces me to use MS Outlook for business email, and Outlook/Exchange only works properly on Windows; unlike the supposedly "intuitive" but to me deeply opaque Apple interface, Windows comes naturally to me (though not so much as the late, lamented CP-M, and yes, I'm that old);... and dammit, it still works...

Your headline is "Not too big to fail after all," but the substance of the article (about hints that the Fed may not let CIT fail, having recognized its importance to the economy) would seem to indicate something along the lines of "Maybe too big to fail after all."