What to plant? Well it can be all flowers, all vegetables or all herbs but I like to mix all three in the same garden no matter where it is located. If you raise your boxes above the floor level, it adds a great deal of interest to the setting and, speaking of setting - why not provide a sit-down garden if it's for an elderly person - or notice the railing boxes in the photograph for stand-up, no bending over gardening. That will save those knees.

With Square Foot Gardening, a deck garden is really no different than a backyard garden. You need room to walk around your boxes so you never walk on the growing soil. You lay down a grid and then you merely start planting each square foot with a different crop. Look up the plant spacing in the book (See Page 101) - remember it's either 1, 4, 9, or 16 plants per square foot. Let's go back to the grid for just a moment. In the photographs of these earlier gardens, we used white twine for a grid. Today's advice is to find a rigid piece of wood or plastic (like molding strips, wood lath or a recycled Venetian blind) for your grid. It's much, much better. With string you have to put in nails or screws. The string rots and breaks, gets dirty easily etc. etc. So many people wanted the rigid grids but couldn't find the right material, so we had them fabricated and started offering them on our catalog page as a kit.

The size and type of lumber to use for the sides is 1" x 6" pine, cedar or redwood. (We don't recommend treated lumber for growing edibles.) The size of your boxes depends really on the size of your deck and how artistic you become. 1 foot x 4 foot boxes bolted to your railing are great. For the open areas, 3 foot x 3 foot or even 2 foot x 4 foot can be arranged in any different pattern and with plywood bottoms, they become movable so it will be just like rearranging your furniture every season.

Just think of your next party as your guests step out on your deck and you snip fresh herbs or lettuce or pull ripe radishes from your garden. Won't they be impressed?

Experiencing decreasing levels of the comfort that ensures our loyalty to the criminal enterprise of American Capitalism, we "average" US Americans comprising the poor, working class, and rapidly shrinking middle class still revel in our relatively meaningless social freedoms (we can say "fuck you" to George Bush but can't even get our "elected representatives" to impeach him for his Nuremberg class war crimes) as the economic manacles and shackles of wage slavery clamp ever tighter about our wrists and ankles.

In pledging allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, we sell our souls for a relative handful of economic crumbs from the table of the US power elite and their express permission to do whatever we please (as long as we stay within "free speech zones," don't threaten public officials, commit no acts that impede the sacred cow of commerce, "just say no" to drugs, pay our taxes that fund a massive military apparatus (that has slaughtered millions) and prop up the Zionist squatters in Palestine, look the other way as amoral corporations rape the Earth and torture billions of non-human animals each year, ignore the abject criminality of corporados, Wall Streeters, and those we have "elected," and act as cogs in the machineries of capitalism to avoid exercising our right to sleep under a bridge).

No doubt about it. We have made our Faustian bargain and are "the murderers of all murderers." Collectively speaking, we US Americans savagely shoved a 12 gauge into the face of God as He stood, mouth agape, stunned at the depth of the depravity and barbarism of our capitalistic ways. We then unceremoniously splattered His brains across the sky that once served as His canvas at sunrise and sunset.

By liquefying God's gray matter we ensured the extinction of cumbersome and antiquated moral principles that impeded American Capitalism's expansion, profit, and growth. Without ridiculous impediments such as justice, compassion, love, the Golden Rule, or truth, souless capitalists found a truly free market in which they could rape, pillage and plunder with impunity, even garnering admiration from the masses for their cunning ruthlessness. To top it off, being the connivers we are, we proudly display God's colossal decaying corpse (an incarnation more hideous than anything yet to spring forth from Rob Zombie's imagination) as our "proof" to the world that we are a Christian nation.

And we "comfort ourselves" by wallowing in the fetid sewage that flows freely from our idiot boxes, enslaving our minds to the Bernays-inspired propaganda that ensures our fealty to a system that is murdering the planet and rotting our souls. Reality television provides us with the twisted wreckage and bloody corpses of a horrific car wreck, piquing our morbid curiosity and distracting us from the prick of conscience or any thought of doing something really stupid, like perhaps ending our rape of the Earth. Kens and Barbies, "sage" analysts, establishmentized minorities, and "populists" pulling down six figures or better (all of whom enunciate, dress, and smile to sickeningly unnatural perfection, mind you), deliver the "news" and affirm the "rightness of our Whiteness." Television is truly a balm to our diseased souls.

TV is so powerful that we don't even need to be watching it for its "healing powers" to impact us. As the conflagration fueled by American Capitalism's insatiable lust for profit consumes the planet, we US Americans preoccupy ourselves with our selfish, narrow pursuits and indifferently banter back and forth about the inanities we worship on television. Will the Patriots win another Super Bowl this year? Who is going to win American Idol? What sycophant will give good enough fellatio to become Trump's apprentice? McMurder for dinner tonight, honey?

"Who will wipe this blood off us?" Since we took God out with a shotgun instead of a blade, we made Lady Macbeth (with her 'damn spot') look like a candy-striper. But what did we care? We'd been awash in sanguinary fluid since our ancestors started eradicating the "primitives" who inhabited Turtle Island. Besides, the high priests of American Capitalism and our false idol, Mammon, are more than happy to absolve us of any sin we commit in our pursuit of money, profit, property, or consumer goods.

As for festivals of atonement, no one does it better. While it may be ridiculously hollow and devoid of meaning, we give plenty of lip-service to our love and respect for our murder victim. And when we set aside a special day for God, we go all out!

Take Easter for instance. That is the one Sunday of the year when most of us put on our "Sunday best" and grace Him with our presence at His house of worship.

On Thanksgiving, we display our gratitude for His help in stealing the "Injun's land" by stuffing our faces with over 40 million turkeys that have been brutally tortured and murdered in our nightmarish factory farming system.

Christmas is the real stunner though. We celebrate His birth by showering ourselves with gifts. December 25th is a disgustingly selfish greed-fest fueled by the runaway consumerism that is capitalism's life-blood and the environment's death sentence. How delightfully ironic is it that we honor God by rewarding ourselves and accelerating the demise of the planet? After all, we hailed Him as our Creator and then blew out His brains.

Was "not the greatness of this deed too great for us?" Let's get serious. We're Americans. We are the "can do," "git 'er done" nation. American Exceptionalism always rises to the occasion, even if the task involves executing a divine being.

And we need "not become gods simply to appear worthy of" having killed God.

As Americans, we already are gods.

The first by-lined piece I ever had in a newspaper dealt with the rise of political parties in Italy that proudly claimed descent from the Fascists of Benito Mussolini. This was almost 30 years ago, when memories of the Fascist era in Italy and Germany were still relatively fresh; one didn't have to be very old - hardly middle-aged - to remember growing up under those regimes or else being touched by their shadow in one way or another. And of course, the Fascist regimes in Spain and Portugal had only ended a few years before the article appeared. So the emergence of openly neo-Fascist mainstream parties in Italy - the birthplace of the movement - was a genuine shock in those days.

It's not shocking anymore, of course. For the past 14 years, Italian politics has been dominated by a Fascist-aligned bloc led by sleazy oligarch Silvio Berlusconi. A capsule description of the dubious neo-Duce that I wrote five years ago for the Bergen Record - on the occasion of Berlusconi's visit to the Crawford ranch of his good friend, sleazy oligarch George W. Bush - is still apt today:

Berlusconi is Italy's richest man, a media mogul who now controls 90 percent of the nation's broadcast media and much of its print media - newspapers, magazines, and book publishing - as well Italy's top sports team, the nation's biggest financial services firm and a vast portfolio of other holdings. His first term in office ended in a welter of corruption indictments; his second has been marked by heavy-handed media manipulation and a shocking use of his parliamentary majority to craft laws exempting him and his cronies from ongoing prosecutions and looming investigations.

He rules Italy through a right-wing coalition that includes a party which proclaims itself the "successor" to fascist dictator Benito Mussolini's sinister faction. He has flatly reneged on earlier promises to divest himself of his media holdings, while conducting a relentless campaign aimed at undermining the authority of Italy's judicial system, a bulwark of the nation's ever-turbulent democratic system. He has sacked journalists from Italy's state television network for criticizing his government - an act of free speech that Berlusconi called "criminal."

Berlusconi was turfed out of office in 2006, but returned to power this year at the head of his most hard-line coalition yet. And these days - in our "changed" post-9/11 world, when Western governments have embraced aggression, authoritarianism and the adoration of raw power as never before - there is no need for Berlusconi's blackshirts to sugarcoat their Fascist proclivities. Yet even though we have learned to expect the worst from our degraded democracies (and are rarely disappointed), it still comes as something of a shock to see Italy reviving one of Fascism's most brutal policies - the official demonization of an entire ethnic group - against one of the movement's most ravaged historical targets: the Gypsies. Seamus Milne reports in the Guardian:

At the heart of Europe, police have begun fingerprinting children on the basis of their race - with barely a murmur of protest from European governments. Last week, Silvio Berlusconi's new rightwing Italian administration announced plans to carry out a national registration of all the country's estimated 150,000 Gypsies - Roma and Sinti people - whether Italian-born or migrants. Interior minister and leading light of the xenophobic Northern League, Roberto Maroni, insisted that taking fingerprints of all Roma, including children, was needed to "prevent begging" and, if necessary, remove the children from their parents.

The ethnic fingerprinting drive is part of a broader crackdown on Italy's three-and-a-half million migrants, most of them legal, carried out in an atmosphere of increasingly hysterical rhetoric about crime and security. But the reviled Roma, some of whose families have been in Italy since the middle ages, are taking the brunt of it. The aim is to close 700 Roma squatter camps and force their inhabitants out of the cities or the country. In the same week as Maroni was defending his racial registration plans in parliament, Italy's highest appeal court ruled that it was acceptable to discriminate against Roma on the grounds that "all Gypsies were thieves", rather than because of their "Gypsy nature".

Official roundups and forced closures of Roma camps have been punctuated with vigilante attacks. In May, rumours of an abduction of a baby girl by a Gypsy woman in Naples triggered an orgy of racist violence against Roma camps by thugs wielding iron bars, who torched caravans and drove Gypsies from their slum homes in dozens of assaults, orchestrated by the local mafia, the Camorra. [More on the Camorra's increasing symbiosis with the state here.] The response of Berlusconi's government to the firebombing and ethnic cleansing? "That is what happens when Gypsies steal babies," shrugged Maroni; while fellow minister and Northern League leader Umberto Bossi declared: "The people do what the political class isn't able to do."

This, it should be recalled, is taking place in a state that under Benito Mussolini's fascist dictatorship played a willing part in the Holocaust, during which more than a million Gypsies are estimated to have died as "sub-humans" alongside the Nazi genocide perpetrated against the Jews. The first expulsions of Gypsies by Mussolini took place as early as 1926. Now the dictator's political heirs, the "post-fascist" National Alliance, are coalition partners in Berlusconi's government. In case anyone missed that, when the Alliance's Gianni Alemanno was elected mayor of Rome in April, his supporters gave the fascist salute chanting "Duce" (equivalent to the German "Führer") and Berlusconi enthused: "We are the new Falange" (the Spanish fascist party of General Franco).

As Milne notes, this Fascist revanche has not drawn a single protest from the leaders of the "free world." Indeed, they welcomed Berlusconi back with open arms to the gilded circle of G-8 supremos last week. Bush was the most enthusiastic of all, greeting his old friend and partner in war crime with enthusiastic shouts of "Amigo!" (Well, it's a foreign word anyway, if not quite Italian), then commiserating with him over Berlusconi's continuing criminal indictments (which, once again, he is using state powers to try to squirm out of). "I read the courts are after you again," the American lawbreaker told the Italian sleaze merchant. "It's unbelievable. I've never seen anything like it. Constantly after you." (One can only hope that relentless prosecutors will be "constantly after" Bush in the years to come.)

II.

But Milne makes a further point. The rise of neo-fascism in Italy, and elsewhere, is tied to the collapse -- or rather the surrender -- of center-left parties to the pernicious doctrines of the Right. Everywhere, these parties --- Democrats in America, Labour in the UK, various Social Democrats throughout Europe - have turned themselves into pale copies of conservative parties, adopting policies that have degraded society, destroyed communities, entrenched injustice, rewarded greed, poisoned the earth, embraced militarism and aggression, inflicted vast suffering on developing nations (through the straightjacket of "market reforms," i.e., corporate-crony welfare), subverted democracy, diminished liberty and gutted the very notion of the common good.

[Yet we are being too kind in calling this process a "surrender." As Arthur Silber has pointed out many times, the Democrats - and New Labour and other craven centre-left parties - have embraced the Right's agenda of elitist domination, militarism and scorn for the common good because they agree with it. Any figures with genuinely "progressive" views have been winnowed out or marginalized by the big money machines that run the parties. Such people are always a minority amongst the self-interested factions who vie for domination over a nation's affairs, of course. But there used to be a more substantial minority of such folks in U.S. politics, with enough leverage to sometimes affect national policy and even score some successes. But this strain has been almost completely bred out, as we have seen in the latest Democratic Congress - the most reviled and unpopular Congress in American history.]

Back to Milne:

...the same phenomena can be seen to varying degrees all over Europe, where racist and Islamophobic parties are on the march: take the far right Swiss People's party, which on Tuesday succeeded in collecting enough signatures to force a referendum on banning minarets throughout the country. In Britain, as Peter Oborne's Channel 4 film on Islamophobia this week underlined, a mendacious media and political campaign has fed anti-Muslim hostility and violence since the 2005 London bombings - just as hostility to asylum seekers was whipped up in the 1990s. The social and democratic degeneration now reached by Italy can happen anywhere in the current climate.

Italy has a further lesson for Britain and the rest of Europe. Berlusconi's election victory in April was built on the collapse of confidence in the centre-left government of Romano Prodi, which stuck to a narrow neoliberal programme and miserably failed to deliver to its own voters. Meanwhile, centre-left politicians such as Walter Veltroni, the former mayor of Rome, pandered to, rather than challenged, the xenophobic agenda of the rightwing parties - tearing down Gypsy camps himself and absurdly claiming last year that 75% of all crime was committed by Romanians (often confused with Roma in Italy).

What was needed instead, as in the case of other countries experiencing large-scale immigration, was public action to provide decent housing and jobs, clamp down on exploitation of migrant workers and support economic development in Europe's neighbours. That opportunity has now been lost, as Italy is gripped by an ominous and retrograde spasm. The persecution of Gypsies is Italy's shame - and a warning to us all.

In the current U.S. presidential campaign, we can see this dynamic of center-left collaboration with the Right - which has been going on for almost a quarter-century in America - playing itself out once again. Barack Obama's "surge" to the Right - as exemplified by his vote for the tyrannical FISA measure - is just another iteration of this process. Likewise, his embrace of the Terror War; true, he wants to do it more "efficiently," and perhaps add a few more targets - in Pakistan, say - but he still wants to do it. He makes no bones about continuing this militarist project which has already killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people, bankrupted the national treasury, and is now - through the Terror War oil price spike - strangling the entire national economy. All of this - especially the Terror War's continuing brutalization and coarsening of the national ethos - is meet food for neo-fascism to feed upon.

Any major steps by the Bush administration to control air pollution or reduce emissions of heat-trapping gases came to a dead end on Friday, the combined result of a federal court ruling and a decision by the head of the Environmental Protection Agency.

In the morning, a federal appeals court struck down the cornerstone of the administration's strategy to control industrial air pollution by agreeing with arguments by the utility industry that the E.P.A. had exceeded its authority when it established the Clean Air Interstate Rule in 2005. The court, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, said the rule, which set new requirements for major pollutants, had "fatal flaws."

A few hours later, the E.P.A. chief rejected any obligation to regulate heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide under existing law, saying that to do so would involve an "unprecedented expansion" of the agency's authority that would have "a profound effect on virtually every sector of the economy," touching "every household in the land."

Taken together, the developments make it clear that any significant new effort to fight air pollution will fall to the next president.

The comments by the E.P.A. administrator, Stephen L. Johnson, reinforced a message that the administration had been sending for months: that it does not intend to impose mandatory controls on the emissions that cause climate change. John Walke, a lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council, a leading environmental group, said, "As a result of today, July 11, the Bush administration has failed to achieve a single ounce in reductions of smog, soot, mercury or global warming pollution from power plants."

Mr. Johnson said he was "extremely disappointed" in the court decision "because it's overturning one of the most significant and health-protective rules in our nation's history."

But on climate change, he said laws like the Clean Air Act were "ill-suited" to the complexities of regulating greenhouse gases.

Mr. Johnson's comments appeared as a preface to a report by the E.P.A. staff sketching out how the emission of heat-trapping gases, particularly by vehicles, might be handled under the Clean Air Act. The report was intended to address a Supreme Court directive that the agency decide whether such gases threaten people's health or welfare. But it also reflects the deep disapproval of controls on such gases by the White House and agencies like the Transportation, Agriculture and Commerce Departments.

In effect, Mr. Johnson was simultaneously publishing the policy analysis of his scientific and legal experts and repudiating its conclusions.

The Clean Air Interstate Rule, which covered states in the eastern half of the country, set new requirements for controls on major pollutants emitted by industry, particularly the electric utilities. At its most stringent, it would have required, beginning in 2015, 70 percent reductions in sulfur dioxide and 60 percent reductions in nitrogen oxide from 2003 levels.

At the time the interstate pollution rule was adopted, the E.P.A. estimated that, when fully in effect after 2015, it would cut by 13,000 annually the number of premature deaths from breathing polluted air.

The court ruling, combined with a court decision this year striking down an E.P.A. rule controlling mercury emissions from power plants, means that virtually all controls on the electric utility industry by the Bush administration have no force.

"The implications are huge," said Lisa Heinzerling, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center. "This is the administration's major air pollution initiative."

The restrictions were designed, Ms. Heinzerling said, to deal comprehensively with a variety of air pollution issues, including the interstate transport of pollutants and the states' obligations to enforce standards to protect the public health.

But with the court's decision, she said, all of the administration's efforts, aside from those involving vehicles, "are gone."

"Anything they've done that has any relation to pollution control has been invalidated," she said.

The court decision disappointed even the victors.

Jim Owen of the Edison Electric Institute said, "In our industry, one of the things we crave is certainty, and this goes in the other direction."

Brent W. Dorsey, the director of corporate environmental programs at Entergy, the large energy producer, added, "With this thing thrown out, we've basically thrown the baby out with the bathwater."

Entergy, one of the companies that brought the case to court, emphasized on Friday that it did not want the whole rule thrown out and that it had challenged only the part that allocated permits for emissions of pollutants around the industry. The company said an 11th-hour change by the E.P.A. had put too much of the cleanup burden on areas using oil and gas for power generation, as Entergy does, and not enough on utilities that burn coal.

Thomas Williams, a spokesman for Duke Energy, which had sued the E.P.A., contesting how the rule allocated the pollution allowances among industries, said in an e-mail message, "It was not the intent of Duke Energy's participation in this litigation to overturn E.P.A.'s Clean Air Interstate Rule."

Mr. Williams pointed out that North Carolina, where Duke has several power plants, enacted a law in 2002 that set limits on sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide that were even tougher than those in the now-defunct federal rule.

Bill Becker, executive director of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies, said on Friday that few states, aside from North Carolina, had laws that would fill the void created by the court ruling.

"Right now we find ourselves in the twilight zone," Mr. Dorsey, of Entergy, said. "How do you proceed now? Do we continue to buy emissions allowances? Do we work on putting scrubbers on, or what?"

Entergy backs a legislative remedy proposed by Senator Thomas R. Carper, Democrat of Delaware, that would set long-term limits on pollutants.P

While industry and environmental lobbyists both expressed concerns about the impact of the court ruling, they divided along more customary lines on Friday's second decision, the declaration by Mr. Johnson of the E.P.A. that existing federal laws were "ill-suited" to the regulation of heat-trapping gases.

The Association of International Automobile Manufacturers released a statement saying, in part, "We share concerns that the Clean Air Act, which underwent its last major amendment 18 years ago, does not include all of the tools and criteria needed to address the global issue of climate change, including requirements to balance the economic effects and impacts on U.S. manufacturing jobs along with the environmental considerations."

Mr. Johnson alluded to the difficulty of applying the Clean Air Act, designed for conventional pollutants like sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide, to greenhouse gases.

Because interagency consensus could not be reached on a road map for such regulation, Mr. Johnson said, he was simultaneously publishing his staff's work and the comments of its critics, which had a definite tinge of hostility toward the E.P.A. regulators.

For instance, the chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality, James Connaughton, wrote that the E.P.A.'s staff "myopically focuses on the Clean Air Act and ignores or understates major intended and unintended consequences that would flow from misapplying decades-old regulatory tools."

Good Morning Middle America, your King of Simple News is on the air.

It really isn't a question at this point of whether America will change, it's how and when. Over the next week or so, in between reporting the news that I see as mandatory, let's take a shot at answering... how and when.

One piece of news that I need to run by you is that IndyMac Bank was seized by federal regulators on Friday after the mortgage lender succumbed to the pressures of tighter credit, tumbling home prices and rising foreclosures.

Now IndyMac wasn't a small bank, if fact, this event marks the second largest financial institution to close in U.S. history. Yet, we accept that news as if it had said, "Rain appears to be in the forecast."

The financial markets fell again on Friday, but are up this morning on the news that our federal government will bail out Fannie and Freddie, who together finance some 75% of U.S. mortgages. Of course, the government doesn't have any money and they forged your name to the loan as a permanent co-signer.

Remember that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are private corporations that are traded on the New York Stock Exchange. Yes, just like Bear Stearns. But fear not, all indications are that our government is through giving handouts. Well, they did commit to continue to pay our 535 brain damaged congress boy and girls as a mercy mission, but no one else.

The write downs for bad loans at banks have already exceeded $300 Billion. That number is expected to reach $1 Trillion, more than three times the current losses. And here you thought it couldn't possibly get worse.

So what can we do? Long term we can throw our leaders out and get some new ones who have read the Constitution and who can pass 5th grade economics. But, figuring that we had a chance to elect Ron Paul and chose instead to run Barrack and John, don't count on much help from the feds.

That being said, we have to change those circumstance and conditions that we have control of. "God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, courage to change the things we can, and wisdom to know that many of our fellow Americans are brain dead."

Little things make a difference and my wife Cathy and I try to think about those little things every day. Talk about it, talk about it, talk about it. We recently drove to the Oregon coast to visit family. We stay in motels that provide a clean room for a reasonable price and also provide a decent breakfast.

We carry a cooler with lunch supplies and drinks. We stop at a park or a scenic attraction and make our own lunch, which also allows us to get a little exercise rather than sitting in a restaurant. The savings more than paid for the increased price of fuel.

I have for some years kept a sealable plastic container full of snacks in my vehicle. Things like trail mix, peanut butter crackers, dried fruit and assorted nuts are included, and yes, exactly like the stuff that I used to buy at the convenience store. But we either make our own snacks or buy them in bulk packs for pennies on the dollar compared to C-store prices.

We also buy hydration drinks, such as Gatorade, in powder form and fill reusable bottles rather than paying the impulse price. Not only do we save money, we aren't throwing away zillions of plastic containers.

Little things add up, but we also need to talk about the big things, for ultimately that is what will make or break us. Change is inevitable and doing so on own terms is paramount. Take the most conservative financial posture possible at this point and time.

And now we've reached the next stage of our seemingly never-ending financial crisis. This time Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are in the headlines, with dire warnings of imminent collapse. How worried should we be?

Well, I'm going to take a contrarian position: the storm over these particular lenders is overblown. Fannie and Freddie probably will need a government rescue. But since it's already clear that that rescue will take place, their problems won't take down the economy.

Furthermore, while Fannie and Freddie are problematic institutions, they aren't responsible for the mess we're in.

Here's the background: Fannie Mae -- the Federal National Mortgage Association -- was created in the 1930s to facilitate homeownership by buying mortgages from banks, freeing up cash that could be used to make new loans. Fannie and Freddie Mac, which does pretty much the same thing, now finance most of the home loans being made in America.

The case against Fannie and Freddie begins with their peculiar status: although they're private companies with stockholders and profits, they're "government-sponsored enterprises" established by federal law, which means that they receive special privileges.

The most important of these privileges is implicit: it's the belief of investors that if Fannie and Freddie are threatened with failure, the federal government will come to their rescue.

This implicit guarantee means that profits are privatized but losses are socialized. If Fannie and Freddie do well, their stockholders reap the benefits, but if things go badly, Washington picks up the tab. Heads they win, tails we lose.

Such one-way bets can encourage the taking of bad risks, because the downside is someone else's problem. The classic example of how this can happen is the savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s: S.& L. owners offered high interest rates to attract lots of federally insured deposits, then essentially gambled with the money. When many of their bets went bad, the feds ended up holding the bag. The eventual cleanup cost taxpayers more than $100 billion.

But here's the thing: Fannie and Freddie had nothing to do with the explosion of high-risk lending a few years ago, an explosion that dwarfed the S.& L. fiasco. In fact, Fannie and Freddie, after growing rapidly in the 1990s, largely faded from the scene during the height of the housing bubble.

Partly that's because regulators, responding to accounting scandals at the companies, placed temporary restraints on both Fannie and Freddie that curtailed their lending just as housing prices were really taking off. Also, they didn't do any subprime lending, because they can't: the definition of a subprime loan is precisely a loan that doesn't meet the requirement, imposed by law, that Fannie and Freddie buy only mortgages issued to borrowers who made substantial down payments and carefully documented their income.

So whatever bad incentives the implicit federal guarantee creates have been offset by the fact that Fannie and Freddie were and are tightly regulated with regard to the risks they can take. You could say that the Fannie-Freddie experience shows that regulation works.

In that case, however, how did they end up in trouble?

Part of the answer is the sheer scale of the housing bubble, and the size of the price declines taking place now that the bubble has burst. In Los Angeles, Miami and other places, anyone who borrowed to buy a house at the peak of the market probably has negative equity at this point, even if he or she originally put 20 percent down. The result is a rising rate of delinquency even on loans that meet Fannie-Freddie guidelines.

Also, Fannie and Freddie, while tightly regulated in terms of their lending, haven't been required to put up enough capital -- that is, money raised by selling stock rather than borrowing. This means that even a small decline in the value of their assets can leave them underwater, owing more than they own.

And yes, there is a real political scandal here: there have been repeated warnings that Fannie's and Freddie's thin capitalization posed risks to taxpayers, but the companies' management bought off the political process, systematically hiring influential figures from both parties. While they were ugly, however, Fannie's and Freddie's political machinations didn't play a significant role in causing our current problems.

Still, isn't it shocking that taxpayers may end up having to rescue these institutions? Not really. We're going through a major financial crisis -- and such crises almost always end with some kind of taxpayer bailout for the banking system.

By Mark Morford

Vividly indeed do I remember the lovely and sordid tale my friend once told me, many years ago, of the terrific guy she once dated, a strapping young thing who - through a series of unfortunate childhood events - had to have a remote-controlled, robotic penis installed in his body.

Let me be more specific. Apparently, this fine lad's delicate man tissues had been damaged in a very unpleasant bicycle accident in his youth, and he could therefore no longer enjoy normal erections. Everything else functioned just fine, but when it came to sex, despite having full sensation, all systems were mangled, all blood vessels shot. Sad indeed.

But then, a savior. Through the miracle of modern medicine and not-so-modern pneumatics, ingenious doctors were able to install some sort of marvelous contraption, a valve and a rod and bladder and a little pump - a complete mechanical system by which our boy could, well, inflate and deflate his manhood at will, last as long as he liked, repeat as frequently as energy and soreness and lubricant allowed, and thereby enjoy a (relatively) normal sex life.

It worked like a charm. It also worked like an aphrodisiac, a mesmerizing technological miracle, and a pair of old Reebok Pump basketball shoes. What you did was: Squeeze a little bulb at the base of the perineum a few dozen times to inflate, to raise the flag and see who salutes. Enjoy indefinitely (!) When finished, simply reach up underneath into God's country and press a different little bulb to deflate the air bladder and, well, lower the mainsail (my friend said this particular procedure sounded like a sad squeaky toy, sighing slowly. She found it adorable).

(Here is where I'd like to tell you my friend's nickname for this lad, but they tell me this is still a family website and baffled children/grandmothers could be reading this and are already panicky that they saw the word "penis" on screen. So I'll just say it rhymed very closely with "The Wonder Sock.")

This heartwarming tale comes to mind as I read of how scientists have now developed a tiny valve they can surgically implant into the manhood of mankind to, well, control the flow of sperm at will. Your own built-in, reversible, radio-controlled vasectomy! they exclaim, with a winking Australian grin.

Apparently, said contraption involves a little remote-controlled switch that can, at the press of a button, activate or deactivate the flow from wherever it is that sperm flows (a musty little furniture shop somewhere on the outskirts of London, I think) by opening and closing a valve installed into the all-important duct known as the vas deferens. Nifty!

I know what you're thinking. A remote-controlled sperm valve? Are you crazy? Who the hell would want something like that?

I'll tell you who: Every modern male under 30, that's who. Hell, add in a digital camera and an MP3 player and maybe built-in GPS, and you've got the next iPod.

See, like my friend's wonder sock, I think such technology would play directly upon the dual modern male fantasies of unlimited penile dexterity and übergeek tech coolness. In the age of gizmo wonders and technologically advanced everything, why not a mechanically enhanced penis? Why not a little Iron Man in your iron man? Make it easy, make it relatively affordable, market it like you would the Bang & Olufsen stereo option on an Audi R8 (i.e., an invaluable enhancement, not a threat), and I say: Viva la revolucion!

It is, of course, all part of the eternal quest for an easy, idiot-proof male birth-control device for consensual adults that doesn't involve sheathing everything in miserable amounts of latex and therefore dulling the finest sensation known to all malehood next to perhaps a superlative foot massage and maybe sipping dark rum in a hot tub with nubile pagan fire priestesses from the moon.

But maybe such a valve won't be necessary. After all, they say there's already been a big breakthrough in male birth control, that scientists have finally developed a surefire "male pill" that knocks any man's sperm count down to zero, and all that's left is a bit of clinical testing. So effective is the new pill that it's apparently safer than condoms, safer than the female pill, safer than staring at a photo of Ann Coulter for three full, agonizing minutes while your sperm commit mass suicide from sheer horror. Amazing.

But apparently there's a problem. Big Pharma doesn't seem to care about this new breakthrough. And why? Money, of course. They say there's just not enough interest. Men don't seem to be clamoring for it, the market doesn't seem to be there, millions don't stand to be made, and hence no one wants to fund more research on the thing, which could result in a wait of three to five more years before such a pill hits the market, if it ever does.

What's more, some argue that dumb-as-nails men are too unreliable for such a thing anyway, that no woman worth her weight in diaphragms and Nonoxyl-9 would dare trust a man to remember to take a pill every day, because of course men are generally irresponsible schlubs who can't even remember their own phone numbers and etc. and so on and cliché cliché cliché.

To which I say, utter and total B.S. There's not a smart modern male I know who wouldn't love to know he wouldn't - couldn't - get a date pregnant, that there could be no "accidents," that he will never get that life-altering phone call. Hell, there's already a trend whereby some baby-terrified men are getting old-school surgical vasectomies in their early 20s, rife with the fear that some nefarious huntress might try to snare them in the baby trap. Shift the power dynamics of fertility and birth control to men? Talk about your massive cultural psycho-sexual upheavals. Watch for it.

But maybe that's neither here nor there. Maybe the pill's researchers need to hook up with the valve engineers and the genius docs who installed my friend's lover's old penis pump way back when, and all work together to solve this most pressing issue and move humanity, uh, forward.

Dear Unterfuhrer Cannon,

Congratulations, you have just been awarded the "Vidkun Quisling Award!" Your name will now live throughout history with such past award winners as Marcus Junius Brutus, Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, George Stephanopoulos, Ralph Nader, Vidkun Quisling and last year's winner Volksjudge Anthony (Fat Tony) Kennedy.

Without your lock-step calling for the repeal of the Constitution, your support of our two coup d'etats, your constant cover-ups from the US Attorney firings to Karl Rove fleeing the country to avoid be subpoenaed, Iraq and these many other profitable oil wars to come would have been impossible! With the help of our mutual friends, the other "Republican Whores" you have made it possible for all of us to goose-step off to a brave new bank account!

Along with this award you will be given the Iron Cross 1st class with ruby clusters presented by our glorious Fuhrer, Herr Bush at a gala celebration at "der Wolf's Lair," formally "Rancho de Bimbo," on 08-23-2008. We salute you Herr Cannon, Sieg Heil!

Signed,
Vice Fuhrer Cheney