In fact, the truly serious ones are those who acknowlege the total craziness. Charlie Chaplin, Lenny Bruce, and Woody Allen come to mind. We can all likely come up with a long list.

Lou Dobbs = public joke.
Jon Stewart = best journalist in America

What is unacceptable is when they attempt to turn their silliness into public law, as the Bushies did with inflicting various forms Sharia-lite. Feed them faith, and they will vote against their economic self interest, no problem.

I do agree that it would be both just and amusing to throw these ripoff artists into the slammer where any secular criminal would wind up.

Thorstein Veblen coined the wonderful phrase "conspicuous consumption" more than a century ago. That is precisely the engine of the market economy. We encourage it.

To paraphrase the Chinese sage Lao Tzu, The man who thinks he can buy class, has none.

Or as the Buddha would have it, Unhappiness is caused by desire.

In "Civil Disobedience," Henry David Thorough famously observed, "Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them."

There is precious little song in the hearts of those poor bastards who believe they are what they own and make monumentally stupid decisions in pursuit of...

Fancy rings? A more expensive house than the next guy?

Sigh!

Nice, M.J. Very sweet.

I think there is something that we are all missing here, and that is a mysterious love of violence and hierarchy that wells up from the psychic murk of those lovelies who call themselves "conservatives." The neocons are the most striking variant of this phenomenon. They have an almost childlike need for some sort of authoritarian "daddy" to tell them what to do. They are lovers of cops and soldiers--not that cops and soldiers are not needed or are by definition evil. Neocons are Manichean. They want "sides," and in that sense are tribal. They are seemingly unable to deal with a world that is complicated and ambiguous.

Their imagination is, in fact, unfathomable to those of us who attempt to be sensible and civilized and have values larger than the worship of Mammon and power.

irresponsible Republicans

some of the Republicans

the more radical Republican lovers"

You're right, generalities are not good.

Some irresponsible Republicans might include George W. Bush, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Bill Kristol, William Bennett, Mitch O'Connell, John Boehmer, Michelle Bachmann, the lawyers who wrote memos approving of torture...

Well, I won't bore you with more names. I'm older. My wrists might get tired from having to sit here at the keyboard all day naming names, leading to a stroke.

Good one, Joe. I had to look it up, I admit. For other morons like me:

Let the welfare of the people be the supreme law

There should be a word for somebody like Mitch McConnell who in this instance is so incredibly blind to irony that it makes any halfway intelligent person want to burst out laughing.

Nominations? Suggestions?

Yoiks! Good.

On the issue of Israel, Obama's speech might have been only a first step on a journey of a thousand miles, but at least he had the courage to step out there. We need more people like M. J. speaking out in support of him.

There are two crimes here. One is fraud, if the courts find that to be true.

The other is a barbarous assault on the English language. Reading that letter is like trying to decipher the Japanese code. The author apparently resorted to insider's lingo and impossible sentences so he couldn't be pinned by anything so crass as the truth.