It was totally reasonable for people to spend their credit. There was real wealth in the overall system to cover it - all that increase in GDP. What was unreasonable was to get suckered into living in a company town, spending at the company store - which is on the larger scale what the scam was. Yeah, we can't go back there now.

Refuse to work for credit. Demand wages. But if you can't afford not to work, and all they agree to pay you is credit, take it. Spend it all. Stick them with the loss if things go bad. It's entirely fair and sane to play that way.

Plenty of people are capable of mounting a major terrorist attack in the US. Anyone with a chemistry degree, or access to a good University library, could within a reasonable time concoct something far worse than 9/11. Yes, you'd have to be crazy to do that. And only a small subset of those crazy enough are also able to think coherently enough to carry such a thing out. But that's still many, many people in the scope of this world's population.

Generally it takes an organized religion to provide the social nexus to both be that crazy, and be smart enough. But keep in mind "smart enough" isn't anything beyond a normal IQ, and some decent study habits. Book-centered religions tend to have people with passable study habits. And that's why killing Taliban is a damn good idea.

And yeah, for them to continue to campaign for future office, to put out flyers that couldn't be more dishonest if they were composed by Satan himself, is well worth commentary.

Here's how it really works, as he's shown in his financial strategy: Obama recognizes that some of us are far smarter, far saner than others - and that that's a reasonably small proportion of the population. We need as much of that small proportion in management as possible. Although it is not in the majority even in management, still there's a better representation of it in management than, say, among the general population.

So you can't just wholesale fire all the management of a sector of the economy and replace it overnight by recruiting from the general population. Neither you nor I know how to run a Wall Street or Greenwich trading house; nor a hospital or medical clinic.

So Obama's an evolutionary, not a revolutionary. That will displease those who think there's some class of "owners" out there to whom the rest of us are "slaves." Too bad. That's a silly meme. We should be very worried about any of our leaders who buy into it. A few Republicans do, and fancy themselves with the "owners." Democrats should - and largely do - know better. You should.

Small deflections in the course of large institutions accomplish compound change over the course of years. If a ship hits the rocks, it doesn't mean you abandon ships altogether, but that you'd better learn to navigate them better. That's where we are with health care - and the overall economy. "Fire all the experienced captains and navigators" isn't a sane first step.

America's peak moment of power was the end of WWII, since we were the winning ally with the least damage from the war. Since then the story has been about the rise of various other countries and regions, especially in Europe and Asia and even Latin America.

There was never an empire. Those who thought to pretend we had one only led us to folly and weakness.

But because our economists and especially government-massaged statistics are in general horribly over-simple and unrealistic, the state of our infrastructure, while recognized by the general public, has never been properly accounted for as the massive debt that it is. Having to fix a bridge to keep it is no different than having to pay a mortgage to keep a house. It's a debt. You only own that house or bridge on condition of substantial future payments.

At least when a house gets repossessed society as a whole still has that house (most often); when a bridge is lost the loss of economic value is total.

As for "maintenance," letting our bridges crumble obviously ruins us. It will cost many billions just to keep them from doing that, employing hundreds of thousands. What's the argument for not getting straight to that business? After we've got all the maintenance issues addressed, if there's still slack in the economy, we can address that then. But we've got years of backlog on maintenance, and "A stitch in time saves nine" you know.

"Growth" is a matter of whether it's healthy growth or cancerous. It's not growth that's good or bad. We need plenty of healthy growth, less of the unhealthy sort. Better schools, better power systems, better research ... all healthy stuff we should invest far more in urgently, to have a richer economy tomorrow that can easily pay off our debts of today.

Now, what are you scared of? That such an concerted prioritization of investments may mean you have fewer toys for a few years, that spending has to be more responsible? Yes. It does. And ten years out we'll all be far the better for it.

Coleman, on the other hand, obviously lost (after the recount), and had as his only chance the prospect that his legal team could sell a set of obviously crooked arguments.

It's not a difference between how hard you fight that this should be measured on. It's a difference between fighting for what you, and more importantly the American voters, have rightfully won, and fighting to steal something you've lost from your opponent, and more importantly the majority of voters in the contest.

Gore was a case of the failure of the good, because he didn't fight hard enough. Coleman is a case of the failure of the evil, and his deceitful struggle to pervert the election only makes it more thoroughly so.

They're in a constant struggle between casting out, and holding onto, their demons.

Notice how neatly abortion maps onto this whole pattern of internal psychological warfare in the Jesus freak. Their fear of abortionists is the very fear that demons have of Christ. They see doctors as being able to effectively cast something out (often something which has "sin" at the root of its existence). This scares them, because they substantially identify with their own demons, demons which, due to their Christian strivings, are also constantly under attack. Demons they know the real Jesus would cast out of them, leaving them substantially different psychologically. Changing them to liberals, like Christ Himself.

If he was throwing a hand grenade at a group of tourists or local citizens, then he's a criminal, and so must not be tortured, and as well must be held in a proper prison, with habeas corpus and other standard rights if held by the US, or with whatever local rights if held by the local government. In addition, US troops should not turn him over to the local government unless the local government meets international standards for prisoners' rights.

The only person arguably guilty of something for which torture is appropriate is someone who's just planted a ticking bomb and refuses to tell you where or how to defuse it. Anyone innocent of that must not be tortured. Being guilty of something is no excuse, especially not being guilty of a normal act of war in wartime.

Which is the most damning hypocrisy here, if we place them side by side? That of the Democrats in 2000, who nonetheless yielded to the Republicans and let Bush be seated, or those of the Republicans in 2009, who refuse to compromise even an inch despite repeated rulings against them by the proper arbitrators of elections?

Shame about having to lose NASA's Houston headquarters though. If they attempt to take that, let that be the casus belli.

This isn't unique to Christianity, of course. In some branches of Islam torture is also central to the faith.

The class background is just brought in as a contributor to the insularity. Obviously people from any class can make that same error once given work at a central bank. However, the upper classes alone claim a virtue to insularity, so perhaps more often fall victim to this false ideal.

As for "education," can there be better proof of the near-total lack in quality of today's Ivy League schools than the current meltdown their graduates have gifted us with, while absconding with millions in their 30s? Obama's qualification for the presidency is far more his community work, by which he learned the nature of the real world, than his time at Harvard. The scope of his vision is the exception, not the rule. A degree from an Ivy should generally be a disqualification.

Perhaps the British upper class schools aren't such a pathetic failure and burden on their nation?

The problem is we've let mathematicians and physicists take over too much of the architecture of the financial system. We should prefer software engineers - and not the ones who work for Microsoft. It needs to be open source, a fully published design at every level, with no proprietary derivatives technologies allowed. Let finance get as complex as it wants, but keep everything in the open, as modular as possible (avoiding systemic risk thereby), truly transparent, truly favoring innovation rather than schemes carried out in secrecy.

So when you properly factor in conservation, and also shifts to other energy sources - which become more economical as they achieve economies of scale - the cost to households will be far lower than if the entire government revenues from cap-and-trade were merely acquired through a direct tax on households. They may even be negligible.

The Republicans are stupid if they believe their simple-minded math works.

It's time we give the treasonous right the oppression they ask for.

Who can Obama bring in when, nearly inevitably now, he fires Geitner? And how can he arrange that substitution in a way that credits Obama, rather than stinks?

So at some point within a few years car demand will surge, quite possibly beyond current world capacity, let alone the downsized capacity we'll likely end up with. And that's not even addressing the resurgence of new demand from China and India once the recession eases up.