You are delusional if you’re parroting Nader’s 2000 talking point about how both sides are equivalent. There is a great deal Obama’s done and failed to do that disappoints me, but I am under no delusions about what would have happened with Geezer and Dingbat, that being the only other choice. You seem to have forgotten what the other choice actually is.

For those of us who work for a living, or hope to, the difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is that between a poke in the eye and a knife in the liver. I know which one of those I can live with. Do you?

He would indeed, and he’d be perfectly comfortable with having any entity bigger and stronger than you, except the federal government, make capricious and arbitrary rules you’d be “free” to ignore by moving (job, home, etc.), which of course everyone has plenty of money to do.

With all due respect, have you actually read An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations? Contrary to the right-wing crew, it’s not a paean to unrestricted free markets, even slightly, and the “invisible hand” phrase is neither important nor, when mentioned, laudatory.

Please let’s get off Adam Smith’s back. He was very enlightened for his time, certainly more than any Republican.

With utmost respect, Mr. Baker, the Walton heirs are not “creative,” except in the sense that they hire people to come up with phrases like “death tax” and other such tripe. Sam Walton was a felon who should have died penniless, and his heirs have done nothing with their unearned wealth.

What kind of stupid horseshit is this? There would be plenty of military applications for all this stuff, and believe me, it would be so deployed…that is to say if it existed at all.

Recto-cranial insertion is a terrible problem, and you need to fix yours.

The way to get alternate systems is to build it up from smaller pieces. For example, San Francisco and Oakland, California both have ranked choice voting. People just love it, contrary to the “oh, those poor little voters will hate the confusion” story the opponents told. Once we’re into the details of which preference voting system is best, we’re a long, long way in the right direction.

Whining about how we have to have it nationally doesn’t advance this idea one whit. In fact, it serves the cause of those who don’t want it because it has you sitting on your hands rather than getting out there and doing something constructive.

What’s really sad is that that’s simply not true. There are full-cycle designs whose waste is much, much less of a problem. IFR is one example.

It’s a history test, not an IQ test.

New Jersey does have a recall mechanism. http://www.ncsl.org/default.aspx?tabid=16581

I wonder how many more disasters it will take before they exercise it.

“they need to stabilize, through modification programs with principal reduction”

Sorry. Disagree. This is where I part with most liberals. I simply will not support anything that basically presses a “reset button” for people who made poor decisions.

You do mean the banks and other financial institutions, right?

Yes, the banks are crooked. Their wrongs does not mean we reward people for buying homes in what was clearly an insanely over-priced market.

It was crystal clear to the people selling, packaging, etc., those predatory loans. It was intentionally made unclear to those predated.

If fraud occurred for a particular mortgage, the bank should be punished and it should be taken into account when reassessing the mortgage.

Excellent idea! How about when fraud occurred for an entire market? That is what happened.

But a blanket modification with principal reduction, driven by the government? No. No way.

What has gone on so far is the very definition of moral hazard. What happens to B of A and its ilk is not really my concern. It’s long past time to start piercing some corporate veils and criminally prosecuting the perpetrators of the biggest fraud in human history.