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• NYU's Nouriel Roubini, the visionary who had been predicting this meltdown, says "The Treasury plan (even in its current version agreed with Congress) is very poorly conceived and does not contain many of the key elements of a sound and efficient and fair rescue plan."

• In the Washington Post last week, Galbraith outlined a multi-pronged plan shoring up and expanding the FDIC, creating a Home Owners Loan Corporation, resurrecting Nixon's federal revenue sharing, and taxing stock transactions (a tax that would fall mostly on speculators) to finance the whole deal.



• The Service Employees International Union has drafted a plan based around a massive investment in public services and national health care, and regulatory reforms preventing foreclosures and forcing banks to renegotiate the predatory terms of their bad mortgages.



• For those in the mindless, zombie-ish "someone has to do something, so we have to do what the White House says!" camp, consider the possibility that you are under the spell of the same kind of White House fear that led us to invade Iraq because of Saddam's supposed WMD.

this bailout proposal has unified both the Right and Left sides of the populist uprising that I described in my new book and that is now even more angry than ever.

Any sitting officeholder that votes for this - whether a Democrat or a Republican - should expect to get crushed under a wave of populist-themed attacks from their opponents

“As we get older, we accumulate all kinds of abnormalities on M.R.I.’s,” Dr. McLellan said. “You can’t use an M.R.I. to say, ‘This person must have really bad back pain and therefore must be disabled.’ It is extremely common to have disc bulge and disc degeneration and disc herniation and have no symptoms whatsoever.”

He said most people with a herniated disc recover within 6 to 12 weeks “without any intervention except time.”

Mexico is one of the worst countries in the world for abductions, along with conflict zones like Iraq and Colombia.

It was funny -- and again, it comes down to one of those things where people want the show to be something it isn't -- how throughout the Omar storyline, people kept saying, "Why doesn't he just call Brother Mouzone and have Mouzone come down and help him?"

It's a Greek tragedy, and everyone's trying to think Antigone or Medea or Oedipus out of the box. Which is understandable. When you go see those plays performed, if they're done well, you know the ending with absolute certainty -- and yet you can't help but think somewhere in act two that the fates are not the fates. And, listen, American entertainment does nothing but sell redemption and easy victories 24-7.

I'm not saying that "The Wire's" unique in that respect -- there's a lot of other high-end television that is dark and continues to be dark -- but I agree with Chase in one respect. I read an interview with him where he said what American television gets wrong relentlessly is that life is really tragic. Not a lot of people want to tune their living room box to that channel. It's an escapist form.

You know why I like talking to you? You always make me feel so optimistic.

It's my job, man. By the way, if you want to not focus on what the f--k's going on, read the newspapers. Suffer the journalism, and don't worry: the big picture will elude you nicely.