Comments by Damn Dirty Ape

Amen.

Ha, ha. They do sometimes lead committee meetings.

The democrats should try this in other areas. Get a black guy to come out in favor of tax breaks for the rich and for not cutting the defense budget and viola thier agenda gets passed.

scattered electorate? The local pols are elected?

I liked the explanation of the need for growth being linked to increases in productivity. One of the better and more concise explanations that I have seen.

Could the Economist get back to us and let us know just how many companies were IPO'd at 100 times earnings and how they fared historically?

Give me a break, all you have to do to get different results is pick a different search engine. I just googled "non-google search engines" and came up with a hundred. Notice in america, which has had the internet for a bit longer, there is no monopoly because people know how to use the internet a little bit better. Perhaps the anti-competition committee could use its money to educate europeans about alternatives to Google and then let the market decide?

Sounds dangerous. I'm a big amazon customer. I use their Prime service which gets me free, speedy shipping and usually a discount. (Full disclosure, also a share holder.) The only time I go into a bricks and mortar book store is to check out a book before buying on amazon or if I really need the book today (very rare.) Amazon also seems to put an emphasis on increasing market share over profits. If I was a bricks and mortar store I would be peeing my pants and certainly not teeming up with amazon. It remains to be seen if ereaders are going to eclipse books but just in case, I wouldn't be pushing all of my ereading customers over to amazon. Very dangerous indeed.

The world did get to see Scotland's commitment to fighting terrorism and keeping its convicted terrorists in jail. A good lesson to remember.

PepsiCo, BB&T bank and Eli Lilly

What the hell are these publicly traded companies doing giving money to a group like this in the first place? Maximizing share holder value?

since the Club Med seems to see them as a *substitute* for structural reforms.

Well put. Why not hold them out as a reward for liberalizing their economies? Medicine first, spoonful of sugar second.

Belt tightening can be spread over years. What the pigs really need to do is liberalize their economies. Get rid of rules that prohibit firing people and make sure you start collecting taxes from everyone. With no change to the underlying economy these states are going to continue to fail. No need to throw any money at them until they liberalize.

A light-skinned black female friend of mine reports that most middle easterners are shocked to hear that she is black and insist she mustn't be as she is lighter than they are. The same thing with brown south americans. Sad that so much of the world is so color struck.

This is one of the bits of chinese culture that outsiders are really interested in. The shoalin monk/ceo should keep up the good work. They are going to need that money to keep the temple looking good. Now to open a four year kung fu school...

I hate tattoos, that is why I don't have any. I love liberty, which is why I would never tell anyone else what to do with their bodies. I think a campaign of opinion influencing would be more consistent with Japan's modern democracy.

Ah, swastika carving punks, how could they have missed that.

For Pete's sake, get some DNA frozen on all animals that face extinction.

I know how you feel. The conservatives make a good argument that speech=money. But the flip side is that money distorts the goal of having our elected official reflect the will of the people.

Kentucky got a waste-cutting opponent of the PATRIOT ACT and other war-on-terror government power who also wants to end pointless wars, repeal drug prohibition, and has a record of tackling corruption.

We need more representatives like this one if it is true.

The big innovation (I read I forget where, but I will happily plagiarize...)of american government is not that we got rid of corruption but that we made our corruption transparent. PAC's could be made more transparent as well. How to decrease the amount of money involved in campaigns is a much more difficult proposition. Conservatives point out that if there were less at stake at election time, in terms of government hand outs, less people would be interested in injecting money into politics. I don't see that happening any time soon.

I mean that exactly. I don't think you have to be governor to be a good president but it is the closest thing to it. I am very suspicious of the fact that Obama never had executive experience. I suspect that it explains some of his approaches during his time in office. The presidency requires more than executive leadership, however, it also requires a tremendous amount of consensus building, more commonly the wheelhouse of legislators and community organizers. Reagan had both and was able to really change the political landscape of his time. LBJ only had consensus building experience but he was the master of it and was able to pass a great deal of legislation, changing the landscape of his era. These past jobs are lousy predictors of future success which is probably the main problem with looking at these things.