What we Americans go through to pick a president is not only crazy and unnecessary but genuinely abusive. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent in a craven, cynical effort to stir up hatred and anger on both sides.

'Prop trading' is just a fancy term for banks gambling in the market for their own profit.

Unquestionably, however, something else is at work, something that cuts deeper into the American psyche. We have a profound hatred of the weak and the poor, and a corresponding groveling terror before the rich and successful, and we're building a bureaucracy to match those feelings.

The party in power almost always unapologetically engages in deficit spending, while the other party argues passionately against the evils of debt and deficits.

Greenspan's eventual explanation for the growing gap between stock prices and actual productivity was that, fortuitously, the laws of nature had changed -- humanity had reached a happy stage of history where bullshit could be used as rocket fuel.

I try to be outraged by things that other people are just very accepting of, as though they're normal and can't be changed. A lot of what I write about is, "Hey, you know, this stuff is really awful, and it doesn't need to be, and that's why it's so offensive." Things should be better.

There are times when American politics seems like little more than two groups in a fever to prevent each other from trespassing upon their respective soothing versions of unreality