Plenty of poor and working-class people got fleeced in housing-related scams. But you could add them all up, and they'd still be dwarfed by the biggest one of them all, Bernard Madoff's Ponzi scheme, which disproportionately targeted the already wealthy. The Dumb Money debacle required the active wo...

The Hilton family could probably hire Blackwater, a.k.a. Xe, to clear the ground and run the entire country as a resort. Cuban cigar tobacco grows fine there. Before I use my full days' allotment of sarcasm, I yield the floor to the NY Times Editorial Board. Haiti’s Despair, Continued The Departme...

Okay, it's straight stolen. And I'm going to link two or three other posts at the end of this blatant theft...none to any that will piss ME off, and there are a few of those available. I picked this one because the writer exposes stuff alien to me...if I'm going to be poking at this stuff with a sti...

How Kennedy Won the House and Lost the South By Richard Reeves The president’s proposals would die in Rules if the two senior, Southern, conservative Democrats on the committee, Howard Smith of Virginia, the chairman, and William Colmer of Mississippi, joined the Republicans. When that happened, a...

My daughter spends a lot of time on LiveJournal, where writers both professional and fan-fictional tend to hang. Today, on the way to our respective homes after watching the Watchmen, she told me about a long...rephrase that, loooooong...cross-blog discussion that came to be called Race Fail 2009. T...

It kills me to see... The government of Illinois, an an obvious attempt to distract America from Blagojevich’s hair, has declared that Pluto is a planet. RESOLVED, BY THE SENATE OF THE NINETY-SIXTH GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF ILLINOIS, that as Pluto passes overhead through Illinois’ night s...

GOP Launches Counteroffensive To Rush Controversy Posted by Michelle Levi The Republican Party today has launched a counteroffensive to the controversial recent questioning over conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh’s "leadership" of the party -- describe it as a White House diversion attempt. And...

Some relatives are loyal to the credit card or bank in question. Some feel a strong sense of morality, that all debts should be paid. Most of all, people feel they are honoring the wishes of their loved ones. “In times of illness and death, the hierarchy of debts is adjusted,� said Michael Ginsb...

More about the study from By The Numbers. Church-goers bought less online porn on Sundays – a 1% increase in a postal code's religious attendance was associated with a 0.1% drop in subscriptions that day. However, expenditures on other days of the week brought them in line with the rest of the cou...

A Moderate Manifesto By DAVID BROOKS You wouldn’t know it some days, but there are moderates in this country — moderate conservatives, moderate liberals, just plain moderates. We sympathize with a lot of the things that President Obama is trying to do. We like his investments in education and en...