Portland, Oregon has been recently declared the most depressed city in the country. BusinessWeek determined this based on "antidepressant sales, suicide rates, unemployment, divorce, and crappy weather." Philly didn't make the top 20 list. That's because we're too busy enjoying......

How The Grinch Stole Christmas I have always been a sucker for The Grinch That Stole Christmas. Not the Jim Carrey live-action version, but the Chuck Jones cartoon, which uses all of Dr. Seuss' original artwork and concepts. A version of that story may be playing out right in front of us. I did not ...

A recent action that received little coverage (other than by BankThink) was the request by Consumers Union that The Treasury Department order the OCC to rescind its preemption regulation. Consumers Union is trying to win the case of Cuomo v. The Clearing House Association, LLC through the back door....

More Preemption Follies Let's be honest -- one of the causes of the current financial crisis is the preemption push by the Bush Administration and their appointed judges in fields that were previously subject to the traditional American adversarial system of justice. Once regulation and enforcement ...

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. ---Hunter S. Thompson Whenever pressure is applied to fragile minds, those minds tend to bend. The latest example of an idea that demands a reply of "get bent" is "Own To Rent." As discussed today by Paul Jackson at Housing Wire, thi...

The Bush Administration and Preemption Hold your hats, they are consolidating power in a few corrupt bureaucrats as they deprive you from access to the courts. One of the least-reported malicious actions of our current gang of idiots, I have been banging the drum on it for some time. Finally, the AP...

And, We Learn About More Of Merck's Vioxx Shenanigans -- A Benefit Of Pharmaceutical Product Liability Litigation (Posted by Tom Lamb at DrugInjuryWatch.com ) For the second time in as many weeks, it was the Johnson & Johnson (J&J) company blog that tipped us off that Ortho-McNeil is respond...

On Monday, David Milstead, the Finance Editor of The Rocky Mountain News, circulated a list of questions to an assortment of heavy hitters in financial services in Colorado (although he appears to have left off a number of others), about the just-announced "Paulson Blueprint" for the reorg...

Justice Scalia -- the 101st Senator In an atrocious, I would say even fascist, opinion, Justice Scalia has turned over the henhouse to the foxes with a preemption decision that will set back consumer rights for decades. Applying the very same policy-based justifications that conservatives decry when...

Someone needs to hit Eliot Spitzer with a Thorazine dart, slap a straight jacket on him, and strap him to a gurney before his Bush Derangement Syndrome causes his head to explode. Not that if that happened, any bystanders would be splattered with gray matter, but when a vacuum is breached, the concu...