With the passage of the 17th amendment, the states gave up their representation at the federal level in a rush of populism. Now both houses of Congress are elected by the 'mob'. To me the answer is to reverse the 17th amendment and then the states can then have their say again. They may then be able to change legislation to keep the tax proceeds within their own state and fix their own roads.

So what makes it ok for a "big paper like the New York Times" to publish unsubstantiated claims? We shouldn't disengage our critical thinking regardless of the source.

I've heard a couple arguments now regarding ebooks vs the blind. The first is the argument put forward by the article, that the new technology isn't designed with use by the blind in mind. The second is that it doesn't actually teach the blind to read via braille and this in itself is discriminatory.

Answering/resolving the first issue doesn't do anything to resolve the second. Unless they can come up with the electronic ebook reader that expresses the content as braille, there will be a group of the population that will still not be satisfied.

The vast majority of the loans were/are not serviced by the original lender. They are packaged together and sold in blocks to other investors. The junk loans were mixed in with the good loans and the revenue from the good was expected to cover the losses from the bad, averaging out.

Instead of the investors vetting these blocks of loans themselves, they outsourced it to the rating agencies. As a further attempt to mitigate their risk, they purchased CDOs which was a fancy insurance product that was completely unregulated.

The rating agencies were expected to look at the packages and assign a risk levels. Unfortunately the rating agencies didn't do their job and over-rated the packaged loans. They too were also operating in the false world where real estate doesn't ever loose value.

Just to spice things up, Freddie and Frannie didn't have to follow industry normal standards of maintaining an appropriate cushion of cash to stand behind the guarantees they had outstanding. This is where the implied support of the US taxpayer came into play.

The loan originators flipped the loans a fast as possible and made their 1% or so origination fee. They had no risk. They made their money at the front of the transaction. They just had to get the paperwork filled out right.

The secondary marketplace attempted to cover their risk with ratings and insurance. They re-bundled the loan packages and resold them, thus complicating the picture more, but also generating transaction income.

Freddie and Frannie operated without concern of risk, Congress had their backs, especially Barny Franks.

AGI and other created CDOs out of thin-air and sold them without regard to reserves to back them up.

Where was the risk in the system.
- The original borrower of the individual loans carry
- Reputation risk of the managers of the various companies involved
- Tax payers of the world and their grand-children, since our economies are all so intertwined.

By bailing out the 'to large to fail' banks and AIG, the governments have introduced so much moral hazard that it will likely take years to recover just that. These companies should have been allowed to fail and the executives that were involved in the decisions banned from the industry. The regulators that approved the mergers that generated these huge companies should loose their jobs and banned from the industry. It wasn't so much a lack of regulation, but a lack of using existing regulation that allowed these huge companies to come into existence.

By doing all these bail-outs of the banks, AIG, even GM and Chrysler the clear signal has been sent that the government has mulligans to hand-out and everybody gets to keep their jobs and reputations.

Become informed and use your power to vote and participate in the system. If you choose to not vote, you abdicate right to complain.

You're only required to purchase car insurance by the government if you intend to drive your car on public roads. In some states you are allowed to self-insure and are not purchase insurance.

As far as I can see, this whole smart-grid concept is being sold as a money saving move when it's really about convincing the citizenry to freely accept rationing, even ask for it. The whole basis for the smart-grid is the notion that we cannot or more correctly, should not generate more electricity. If this is allowed to continue, we will all be forced to accept a lower standard of living.

In our state it's called a Sales and Use Tax and the Use Tax is the same percentage as the sales tax. The Use Tax just has an upper limit for a given transaction. Several companies I used to work for always audited their sales tax payments on transactions to make sure they didn't exceed the limit and if they did, they filed for refunds on the overage. The difference is that the state doesn't want to attempt to enforce this upon the populace at large, but rather offload the expense and headache onto private business, just like they already do with income tax, payroll taxes and the existing in-person sales tax.

A half-dozen hardcore scientists? How about 31,000 (http://www.petitionproject.org/index.php)? I'm more concerned with the continuos indoctrination of our students at all levels via the public school system and the general population via pretty much any media channel. The constant drum beat of this will likely lead to people doing more to damage the environment in misdirected efforts to 'fix it' than what CO2 will/can do on its own.