So could someopne explain to me, in very simple language, how it advances the pro-EFCA cause to be asking people to sign on to Newt Gingrinch's petition ???

And yes, the IBM Selectric II typewriter remains a far better method for one person to get words onto one piece of paper than any computer system that Bill Gates and his twits can devise. At just $7. per hour wasted in foul-ups, breakdowns and failures to perform as advertised, Microsoft owes me at least $7000 over the last ten years.

Who is talking about educating them to become responsible lovers, not quick-shot hustlers ??

I'm probably not the best one to be talking, I was near socio/psychopathic in all phases of my personal relationships -- and my relationship with myself -- until my late 20's, but in my defense I always knew that I needed a willing partner, even if I was very confused about what loving relationship really entailed in terms of attitude and effort on my part ...

a more important, and to my mind more basic issue that can be fixed by a simple IRS interpretation ... denying the business from deducting excessive salaries & bonuses as a business expense.

You can pay 'em whatever you want, the lucky ones can pay income tax at the prevailing top marginal rate. but the business can't deduct anything over, say $2 million per year as a necessary and ordinary cost of doing business.

Now clearly a Citicorp or a GE has a zillion accounts and transfer prices that can be manipulated, perhaps, so that the company doesn't incur a higher tax bill because they can't deduct a half a billion or whatever in outrageous executive giveaways ... but at least they'd have to make the effort to do the manipulations, and at some point even for them and at a much sooner place for much smaller companies, that regulation would bite and force businesses to regulate their own behavior.

I'm a bit of fan of big-media sports, I myself might go for an exception for unionized employees of anti-trust-exempted sports leagues, but our Congress is so sleazy, and our pitchfork momentum is so necessary, that I gotta say it's gotta be a populist revolution, with a low limit and no exceptions for anything ... you can pay 'em more than 2 or 3 mill a year, you just can't deduct it as a business expense on the business's tax form.

How did Merril get from there, the world I remember from reading my dad's Fortune magazines and being his caddy at the (nouveau, down-scale Southern Cal) country club in the early years of the Johnson Administration, to here ?

But how and why did someone who echoes Republican talking points against FDR get in here as a columnist? 'We all know" the New Deal didn't end the Great Depression? Excuse me, I haven't read every word of the recent Krugman blogs that got into this, yet the impression I got was that young Galbraith and Krugman definitely do not know this. I got an honors degree in Modern History 35 years ago, specializing in Europe, but that's not what I remember either.

The National Recovery Administration was FDR's biggest failure? That's definitely not the consensus opinion, go back and read John Gunther's Inside USA from from the 40's. The NRA was essentially a sort of national/socialist management council of business, labor and government interests, which did regulate supply and prices in all major industries: A SIMILAR COUNCIL RAN THE US ECONOMY (but without labor participation) in 1917-19, and the NRA Councils were essentially ressurected with even more powers to AGAIN RUN THE US ECONOMY -- extremely succcessfully -- from 1942 to 1946.

I'm going to go back into the 3 volumes of Harold Ickes memoirs of the period, which I read in the 70's. What I remember is that many programs were not established until deep into 34 and 35, the actual implementation of the programs on the ground was subject to all manners of local political pressures at all times and the whole first four years were very messy in Ickes day-by-day blow-by-blow account of the infighting, that FDR himself was very vague, Olympian and sometimes wishy-washy in dealing with/overlooking most of this infighting, and yet it all worked out pretty well in the end.

Mr. Hamby's views sound much like a recent Rich Lowry column I had to put up with in my local paper. When was he born, what was his family's status through the First Depression and did his research include anything from all the union and non-union working class millions in the flyover states, for whom all anecdotal evidence from the period itself indicates they gained much hope and much stability and progress.

Even though day-by-day politics through 1945 and after remained very messy. And even though FDR's major contribution, in my reading of Ickes, consisted of sponsoring all-night beer and poker parties on his yacht for selected advisors, Congressional leaders and Supremem Court justices.

How come when our D senator from Oregon Wyden had a hold on a bill, just about a year ago on an enviornmental bill if I remember correctly, Harry Reid rode right over that -- and aside from a few blog comments on TPM threads, the issue of over-riding THAT hold had no traction among either politicians or media.

Why exactly is it again that Reid and 56-57-58 other Democratic Senators have to respect Cornyn's hold?

You're right that it's not _just_ that we don't have severe sentences for out-right political corruption and that this is only a shadow of the "wink-wink-nudge-nudge" corruption that has become solidly institutionalized in lobbying behavior at all local, state and federal levels of the system, but you come down too harshly in seeming to dismiss the value of citizens' demands for severe sentences for political crimes.

I for one have long been advocating the death penalty for a variety of political crimes, just as a form of propaganda for places like the break room where I work.

I'm old and wily enough that I can do this even though I'm perfectly open to the various reality-based arguments against the death penalty for most if not all crimes, and even though my spiritual principles allow that waves of popular feeling in most any population-group will seldom be stopped by any spiritual principles besides their own. Which spiritual principles will, of course, bend to accommodate feelings of mass vengeful murderousness when these become overwhelming.

So returning to the point, I've long called for the death penalty for being either a briber of a Congressperson or a Congressperson who is bribed. Sure, there's only one William Jefferson and only one Ted Stevens -- and yet how much alike in basic ways they are !! -- and the big, bogging-us-down problem is the 533 others who take 5 and 6 figure donations from the ownership class in their district or state, while agreeing with a wink to vote for the specific corruptions demanded by their donors against the 98% of the rest of the public.

We Will, in good time and with good will, find ways to monitor and punish that behavior too -- I do like the idea of 24 video-taping of all elected officials, you can go into a closed bathroom after a monitor verifies their is no exit or communications devices enclosed, and conspiring to violate that carries a whopping penalty.

In the meantime, it is absolutely salutary for us to publicly demand whopping penalties on overtly corrupt behavior, just as a talking point to get the attention of the many, many corrupt "mules," carrying corrupt corporate water, who populate our current media, PR/advertising and political "elites."