Frankly, I don't consider my vet's opinion on this issue any more valid than mine. Or my college roommate's (BS, went to law school), or my brother-in-law's (PhD, neurology).

At its core, the Republican argument is that increasing cost will curb consumption. Which of course is exactly the point.

There are studies that dispute IPCC data on both the high side and the low side, but it strikes me that when evidence of climate change becomes irrefutable its impact will be irreversible.

I'm not sure what message what message Mr. Gordon would have had the president deliver that day. He acknowledged -- as he has since his inauguration -- the the bitter realities of a business and an economy in deep recession. Yet his message was about a smaller but still vital company competing for the future. It had to be.

I thought about appending my comment to the second half of your "rant" (I didn't consider it so, by the way), but decided not to because I wasn't trying to expand on your observation, but make a parallel one. Clearly we are of like mind on this subject.

In the embarassing round of media blubberfests he engineered upon his return, Sanford has reached out of his conservative base by playing to its endless appetite for moralistic self-flagellation. True to his Southern male archetype, he has depicted himself as a tragic hero, a David for our time who, having suffered a mighty fall, grandly ascends the national stage to offer himself as an object lesson in human frailty. By Sanford's calculation, alienating his friends and humiliating his family is an acceptable price to pay to protect what little political capital he has left.

Needless to say, the media has rushed to the trough to satisfy its endless appetite for tabloid sensationalism. Not one reporter has confronted him directly with the question: "Governor, you explained your vote to impeach a president by saying he violated his "higher oath" to his wife. Having violated this oath, shouldn't you step down now, and if not why?"

Sanford has never shied away from using principle to justify his decisions. But in the governor's calculus, principle is fungible political capital to be expended in pursuit of personal ambition. As always, the conversation is all about him. As always, the victims of his convictions are pushed offstage.

While I feel for the governor's wife and sons, the real victims here are the citizens of South Carolina. Not the pious breastbeating moralizers who, like him, use Puritan orthodoxy to justify personal comfort in the face of widespread misery. The real victims live in the corridor of shame, mired in endemic poverty and the benign neglect of their government and their neighbors. They are laid-off workers who faced expiration of their unemployment benefits until the governor grudging agreed to an eleventh-hour request for Federal assistance. They are the parents and schoolchildren who faced draconian cutbacks in education funding until a lawsuit brought by a child forced his hand.

Now, we face eighteen months of political melodrama during which nothing will be done to address this state's innumerable problems. We face the prospect of giving the power of incumbancy to a juvenile lieutenant governor who is incapable of providing the leadership we need. And we must live with a state democratic party unable to field a candidate strong enough to make any kind of difference.

Once again, it's all about Sanford. It's sad, and it's disgusting.

Framing the "global war on terror" as a conventional military conflict has spawned a host of evils. One is the misappropriation of the doctrine of preemptive war. Another is the strategic predisposition toward overwhelming force which, as you point out, has led to the use of cities as force multipliers.

Cities will draw acts of terrorism because that's where the landmarks and the people are. We would be far better off if we adjusted our strategy accordingly.

Get real, Mike. The day you can sued for dropping someone from your friend list is the day we lose our last shred of social comity.

But our middle class ethos says the path to progress lies in skill sets that create far more cubicle drones than satisfied knowledge workers. Trade schools and apprenticeships used to be the bedrock of middle class education, something to aspire to. Today, not so much.

Jobs for welding engineers -- requiring a four-year degree and training in the trade -- pay six figures right out of school. That's demand-based compensation. Why shouldn't these folks laugh all the way to the bank?

I do have ideas. I hope I'll find the energy and commitment to try some of them out in my lifetime. I'm interested in revitalizing social communities -- supporting real participatory democracy at the grassroots.

And I love working with my hands.

Some of the things Rowan mentions in her great post downstream make a whole lot of sense to me. The trick is to help people gain enough peripheral vision to make them happen.

Peace.

The tech college here has courses and commitments from employers. They can't fill the classrooms.

Spittin' rage at corporate fat cats is a small step in the right direction. Returning to a more progressive tax system is a bigger one.

And a giant step -- one among many -- might come from reevaluating the nature and value of the work we do. Reich's symbolic analytic has been the next step up for middle class families for a generation. Now, in addition to being saturated in cheap crap we don't need, our labor pool is glutted with white collar professionals, the majority of whom are condemned to endless downsizing and cubicle hell. This wasn't just foisted on us by the ruling elite. It is what we wanted.

Even where I live, an old textile town that has never fully recovered, welding jobs that pay $100,000 out of the blocks go unfilled. Why? It's dangerous, dirty work. The kind other folks ought to be doing.

The long-term solution is to provide infrastructure that supports the efforts of displaced workers to remain productive. I disagree with those who maintain that manufacturing workers lack the skills, motivation or opportunity to do so.

The problem, it seems to me, lies in the narrow and rather blithe assumption that "symbolic-analytic" jobs are only path to value creation in a post-industrial economy.

This assumption, enthusiastically promoted by our university system, has driven a generation of students to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars to burnish their symbolic-analytic credentials. For far too many, their investment is rewarded by cubicle jobs that provide little satisfaction and, as eds points out above, create minimal value.

Our obsession with producing the most new stuff at the lowest possible cost undervalues the contributions of those who lay brick, sweat pipe, weld beams and repair the stuff we break and now, suddenly, can't afford to replace. Matthew Crawford argues persuasively for a return to these values in a remarkable essay in the Times magazine. It should be required reading for anyone contemplating the nature of work in and emerging new economy, and I think it is key to understanding the president's economic policy.