Onyx Lynx

The United States has been involved in negotiations over the Golan Heights before, notably those brokered by Bill Clinton in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, in 2000. Those talks, despite their last-minute collapse over border disputes, among other issues, provided the backbone for the recent indirect negotiations. Martin Indyk, who advised Clinton at Shepherdstown, said that those talks were about “territory for peace.” Now, he said, “it’s about territory for peace and strategic realignment.”

so when we hear about gazillionaires angry because they can't continue to scam money out of the very system they themselves broke, pardon us if we don't cry.

But real retention bonuses: What an idea! You get a job, and then your boss comes around and says, "Do you still want that job?" and you say "Yes" and he says, "Great, here's $100 million."

What a sweet idea. Plus, as I understand it, you could order an extra ficus for your office if you wanted one.

During those years, and I want to make this clear, I never received a retention bonus as such. There were no ficuses slipped under the table.

The curious thing about the various plans hatched in the ’90s is that they were, at base, all the same plan: “Here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!” The details differed, but the core assumption behind all imagined outcomes (save the unthinkable one) was that the organizational form of the newspaper, as a general-purpose vehicle for publishing a variety of news and opinion, was basically sound, and only needed a digital facelift. As a result, the conversation has degenerated into the enthusiastic grasping at straws, pursued by skeptical responses.

Liddy made AIG sound like an orphan begging in a soup line, hungry and sick from being left out in someone else's financial weather. He conveniently forgot to mention that AIG had spent more than a decade systematically scheming to evade U.S. and international regulators, or that one of the causes of its "pneumonia" was making colossal, world-sinking $500 billion bets with money it didn't have, in a toxic and completely unregulated derivatives market.

Nor did anyone mention that when AIG finally got up from its seat at the Wall Street casino, broke and busted in the afterdawn light, it owed money all over town — and that a huge chunk of your taxpayer dollars in this particular bailout scam will be going to pay off the other high rollers at its table. Or that this was a casino unique among all casinos, one where middle-class taxpayers cover the bets of billionaires.

People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they're not pissed off enough.

Stories are important. Stories, in fact, are life. They are what is left of our unique experience in this world. They speak--no. They scream. And when an author sits down and constructs a completely imaginary world in their heads, if people like me, people like us, do not exist in it, or exist only to be ridden like animals or raped or murdered or humilated or destroyed so that an audience can acheive catharsis via symbolic annihilation of our lives, bodies, and souls, well, certainly, we can sit down and look at the floor and say: yes, you're right, that is what we deserve.

Or we can stand up. We can scream back. We can band together. We can demand our right to exist, to take part in humanity, to learn, to grow, to evolve, to self-examine.

at least it was better than last time i dealt with edd....at that time they told me i was an attractive girl...i could figure out a way to get money. nothing like a government agency to tell you to go prostitute yourself. (i didn't by the way...i didn't want to become a republican.)

This preference for markets is common, but it is not wise. The health-care system is not at all like other markets, because health, for obvious reasons, is not at all like other goods. (The demand for not dying, to give just one example, is pretty much unlimited.)

The deregulated government and waning culture seems to ultimately free the barely contained id usually contained by the weak vessels of theory proven wrong, to wreak havoc on those who might trust in the logical and empathetic order of things. You would thinkthat in absence of some superego, a social structure might come forward to keep this all in line so that no one gets hurt. Where is the superego or even a little regulation? When did it become OK and even just part of business to state that you screwed people over but it was lawful? If the conflict of interest is between the patient in the hospital and the shareholders....when does it stop? when you've denied care because your first responsibility is to the business dealings of the shareholders? The answer is that it doesn't stop, and it may signal the end of the cycle of pure unfettered capitalism...which might mean a sharp turn back with a new administration or possibly that a tipping point has been reached and the whole thing is gonna come crashing down.

My cousin's marriage and long term commitment to his partner show more "defense of marriage" and more demonstration of enduring and pure love than my four tawdry debacles of drunken cruelty, faithless and indulgent recklessness which all resulted in hurtful, and messy divorces.

And today, while Rush Limbaugh freaks out on national television and Freepers become ever more irrational about Barack Obama every day, attributing to him the sinister motivations that we now know for certain motivated the previous Administration, we too must always keep George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and their nefarious deeds at the front of our minds, to always remind us of how close we came to danger.

But in a free country, you don't prevent pacifists from getting on airplanes because you're trying to prevent terrorists from flying, and you don't refuse entry into the country to journalists from friendly nations. Neither do you incarcerate people for lengthy periods without trial, let alone torture them. Saddam was a dictator, but many Iraqis went about their daily business without encountering any trouble with him and his government. Millions of Soviet citizens did the same under the USSR, but that wasn't a free country, either. Pretending that nothing is wrong because you don't personally know any of the people who are being abused this way does not provide evidence that the country you live in is, in fact, free.

Truth is, if you’re a lover of liberty, the corporate grip on our lives is much more restraining and humiliating than the government grip. The number one reason people self-censor and carefully hide who they are and what they believe is not fear of government censure, but the fear that you’ll never be able to get paid employment. Obeying a speed limit is less demoralizing than peeing in a cup for a job. The grind of the cubicle life saps the spirit more than arguing with the guy from the Metro offices ever could. But conservatives happily submit to the much more oppressive corporate authority because it’s legitimate, male authority. Federal authority is seen as feminine and illegitimate, especially if Democrats are in charge.