Jon in Pasadena

I recommend using the air-horn on their fat-asses! /Gregggggggg Williams>

Don't you agree that there's one rather important difference between being stuck in an impossibly long line for early voting, vs. on Election Day? Yes, the voter registration system is not perfect, especially when compounded with actual fraudulent registration activity. It is up to the dedicated workers at the polling stations to screen out un-registered voters from illegally casting their ballot(s).

There were at least two, maybe three plays where I swear he had a good angle on the ball carrier, and it looked like he held up at the last second and "deferred" to a speedier DB to make the tackle...which resulted in an extremely predictable extra +5 yards for the Jests. Dammit, if you're a friggin' LB and you have a kill shot on the runner: TAKE IT!!!

I cannot believe we are losing to this HORRIBLE Jets team.

You could always move to Alaska. Non-stop belly laughs for years!

Please clarify: These alleged former cries of disenfranchisement -- were they referring to long lines for early voting or on election day? (Your observation that the "results" were delayed implies the latter.)

That's how I roll.

Too much emboozling will do that to you. Fortunately, I hear Mke Ditka has a solution for you.

Oh, believe me, I know. I'm right here with you. Interestingly, it seems a cost-benefit study was actually done on mylar balloons a while ago, and that study concluded that the risk was pretty small, and the business is apparently much huger than I would have guessed. So it's probably (yet another) dumb law. Non-sequitar: My default position on ballot propositions is to vote "No" on the theory that most new laws are bad, unless I have compelling evidence to the contrary in a specific case.

Tools come in all shapes and sizes.

What a horrible idea. I'd even go so far as to speculate that a better plan would be to do the exact opposite as this Ghilarducci person's plan: phase out SS for new applicants gradually over a set timetable down to zero, and compensate the people who will get shafted by increasing the tax deductability of their 401k contributions. That way the Feds would be exchanging a possible revenue hit for a few years for a guaranteed reduction in entitlement spending forever. The people who're already retired wouldn't be affected at all, the people (like myself, probably) who would be partially shafted by the plan would have some tax relief to cushion the blow, and all those born after SS was phased out would live in a world where they were accountable for their own financial security. It's not perfect, but I think it's much better than the cluster-!@#$ that is the Ghilarducci plan.

Yeah but in your example that works out to a difference of a whole 900 dollars!! You can not possibly expect someone who grosses 280 grand a year to figure out a way to make do without that extra $900. It's, like, the worst legalized theft ever.

I took one look at her photo with the "backwards B", and immediately thought to myself "This idiot scraped herself with a spoon handle while looking at herself in a mirror. What a tool."

"Low Spark" was one of the very first songs I learned on guitar...

Yeah it's going to put a real damper on all my mylar balloon-releasing outings. I was in Arizona over the weekend, and thought it a minor miracle that I could watch the game on TV -- or half of it, anyway.

Isn't that McCain's economic plan, in a nutshell?

I wouldn't say "hysterical"; for me it was more of a muted chuckle + I also like the fact that the World Health Organization's AIDS chief is Dr. De rooster And the "head" of WAD agency, "Dick Pound" was always good for a laugh. I feel so immature.

Are you trying to deprive me of all the pleasure I get by laughing at Kansas?

I didn't read too much into it, myself. I just figured McCain's train of thought just probably blew through a couple of junctions before his mouth caught up. I expect he was thinking something along the lines of "Which one of the two candidates you see standing before you do you think voted for it -- that one!" But, of course, it probably didn't come out quite the way he wanted. I look forward to many such entertaining gaffes if he somehow wins this election: "Oh, I'm sorry, General. I meant to say I do NOT want you to initiate saturation bombing of Iran". Whoops!

I'm sure glad everything else is going so smoothly these days that I have time to worry about really important issues like Prop 8.

Non-directional option spreads? Iron Condors?

I have no plans to move, although plans sometimes do change unexpectedly. Where I bought, the median sale price for SFR was down about 12% YOY in August. I bought in November 2007, so I'll have to wait a couple months to see where we're at then. I'm not too worried; the below-median sector (where I am) has very solid support. If my area dropped another 20%, I'd expect that most of LA would have crashed to Detroit-like levels. I suppose it's possible, if we're really entering another "Dust Bowl" era.

Thanks, that was very helpful. In my case, I put about 23% down on my property late last year, and I'm crossing my fingers & toes that that will be enough equity to ride out the current cycle without going underwater.

Hey, I think you should go mainstream with your philosophy. You'll want some kind of snappy slogan though...perhaps something like this: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."

GG, could you clarify for me what, if any, differences you perceive in the "impact on the rising mortgage debt" of performing vs. non-performing debt? My understanding (which is almost certainly imperfect) of the mortgage-related factors in the current liquidity crisis (I realized there are other factors as well), is that the CDOs or MBS, or what have you, comprise "good" debt bundled with "bad", and they are so deeply intertwined that no-one wants to touch any of it right now, thus reducing the market, and hence the market value, of those securities to near zero. I see how performing debt gets added into the total, but I don't see how you can blame the complying (paying/performing) mortgagee for the subsequent collateralization and sale of his mortgage? Ah - I read a few of the other threads, so I might have a glimmer of where you're at with this...are you saying that highly leveraged but performing mortgagees are implicitly stressing the system because, in the event of a severe downturn, they may more easily transition to non-performing debtors, thus ratcheting up the crisis yet further? And if so, then where, exactly, is the cut-off between too-leveraged and not: ability to keep paying one's debt obligations for an interval of 6 months of joblessness? a year? 2 yrs? ... infinite? (Apologies in advance if I've misunderstood your argument.)