WIP

No kidding! But Stephan Dion went so far out on a limb, proposing a green plan with a carbon tax, that I actually considered that maybe he had the strength of conviction. But what do I find in the news today: Green Shift: Are Liberals downplaying eco plan? WINNIPEG–Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion yesterday appeared to back away from his Green Shift plan featuring a controversial carbon tax by insisting it is not a major part of his election platform. And here I was actually planning on voting for a Liberal for the first time in over 20 years! The Liberals have been promoting their Green Shift Plan all summer, but rather than fall on his sword, Dion would rather try to scale it down and cling to the extremely faint hope of winning the election, and sacrifice whatever semblance of pride he has left! Since I have no reason to vote Conservative or N.D.P. either, I'm going to check the box for the Green Party candidate. The FPTP system makes it next to impossible for new parties to gain a foothold; but these aren't normal times! The Liberals may implode by taking away just about every reason to vote for them, and the NDP should have gone the way of the dinosaur years ago! There's no likely way to stop a Harper majority government it seems, but there is an opportunity to establish a new party with new ideas to shake up the system.

Well, one thing's for sure -- if you want to force all women, even in cases of rape and incest to give birth -- you're not a feminist! If you take no practical steps, such as promoting birth control and good sex education programs that would help reduce the numbers of teen pregnancies before an abortion decision has to be made -- you're not a feminist. If you want no assistance for working women who have children -- you're not a feminist. If you oppose equal pay for equal work, you're definitely not a feminist -- but you win a first class ticket on the Sarah Palin campaign bus. From what I've read so far, most of the feminist pundits are outraged by Sarah Palin for trying to pose as a feminist, while she offers no help to lesser women who are straining under the effort of juggling work and childcare; and in her brief stint as Governor of Alaska, she has spent the bulk of her time on issues like aerial hunting, gun rights, oil and gas issues, and seems to have no plan to deal with problems like rape and incest, even though the rates of these sex crimes are higher in Alaska than any other state in the union. You can't pass off feminist critics as just leftwing idealogues; if you look at Sarah Palin's belief statements and her records as a governor and mayor, it doesn't seem that she cares anything about any issues that specifically affect women. It's easy enough to find out about the group; they have their own website! But, if you take the time to do some reading on the FFL topics page, you'll find that they don't have much outside of abortion and a few articles on euthanasia and assisted suicide -- which they also oppose - surprise, surprise! There's also not a whole lot of support for birth control besides catholic roulette, or as it's otherwise known "natural family planning." But I did find a paragraph supporting that equal pay legislation that Sarah Palin opposes, so I guess that means she is even on the far right fringe among members of this group! FFL looks like another "lipstick on a pig" story in my opinion. They can call themselves prolife feminists, but there are probably real feminists out there who want to stop abortions also, but at the same time, believe that women should be regarded as independent moral agents, and therefore have the final say on whether to carry a pregnancy to term. Prolife feminists say there is only one right decision: Have that baby -- even in cases where she is pregnant as a result of rape or incest. They would more properly call themselves fetalists, rather than feminists, since the rights of the unborn, whether it's a fetus or a fertilized egg, are the only rights that they give much attention to.

Do you think Factcheck is some freakin divine revelation or something! Many issues, likely most issues, don't have simple black or white answers. YOu have to do your own "factchecking" and make a largely subjective judgement on what explanations you consider to be the most plausible. There is no One Stop shopping guide where all of your questions can be answered for you, even if the hosts try to be unbiased and well intentioned; they are just as much at risk of falling for spin, lies and misrepresentations as the rest of us! Well, here are some facts that can't be denied about the Palin's connection to a state party: The Alaskan Independence Party's goal is the vote we were entitled to in 1958, one choice from among the following four alternatives: 1) Remain a Territory. 2) Become a separate and Independent Nation. 3) Accept Commonwealth status. 4) Become a State. Her husband's membership in the party between 1995 and 2002, is verified by Alaska State Elections official Gail Fenumiai. Perhaps many A.I.P. members assumed she was a member because she attended conventions with her husband. She was certainly not critical of the party or their goals when she made a video address to the 2008 Alaska Independence Party convention and expressed her feelings of kinship with the secessionists on reducing government spending, expanding individual rights and making the state self-sufficient: Your party plays an important role in our state’s politics. I’ve always said that competition is so good, and that applies to political parties as well. I share your party’s vision of upholding the constitution of our great state. My administration remains focused on reining in government growth so individual liberty and opportunity can expand. I know you agree with that. We have a great promise to be a self-sufficient state, made up of the hardest-working, most grateful Americans in our nation. So as your convention gets underway I hope that you all are inspired by remembering that all those years ago, it was in this same city that Alaska’s constitution was born. And it was founded on hope and trust and liberty and opportunity. I carry that message of opportunity forward in my administration, as we continue to move our state ahead and create positive change. So I say good luck on a successful and inspiring convention. Keep up the good work, and God bless you. What does she mean by "keep up the good work?" She is aware of the party's other goals! A state governor should not be asking such a hypothetical question in the first place! Interesting that the librarian somehow lost her job afterward; but if someone wants to be intentionally obtuse, they can deny any connection to her "hypothetical" questions about banning books. According to the police chief who she fired in the Troopergate scandal, Palin asked similar hypothetical questions about how her ex-brother-in-law could be fired, and followup questions regarding why he was still employed; but never directly said 'either you fire him or you lose your job!' FACTCHECK is a little too dense to pick up the subtleties of her intimidation tactics and indirect threats that could be plausibly denied in court, but have appeared in the complaints of many other state employees . Here's another example from an issue I didn't bother to raise, where the whole creationist strategy has floated right over their heads: Palin has not pushed for teaching creationism in Alaska's schools. She has said that students should be allowed to "debate both sides" of the evolution question, but she also said creationism "doesn't have to be part of the curriculum." Creationists in positions of power like Sarah Palin, know full well that they have such an extremely weak scientific case for their views on the natural world that they have repackaged them as a so called nontheistic theory called "Intelligent Design" and claim that they merely want schools to "teach the controversy" There is no controversy among biologists, paleontologists and the like; the controversy only exists in fundamentalist churches, and the goal of creationists in high office is to warp the minds of children who don't know the facts about science or the theory of evolution. So, Factcheck is wrong again that labelling Palin as a meddling creationist is a false charge!

Really! Never! I seem to remember Clinton Derangement Syndrome back in the 90's. Guys like Limbaugh couldn't shut up about how Bill Clinton was using a triangulating strategy of offering policies that would appeal to social conservatives and seniors, such as funding the V-chip and hiring more police. It wasn't a lot different than the Bush Administration's "No Child Left Behind" education policy was concocted to win some liberal support, but guys like Limbaugh were outraged that Bill Clinton wasn't following the gameplan and was denying his dream of making America a one party state with Republicans as the permanent ruling class.

Oh! And what are the facts? Should we take the word of a woman who lied about selling the plane on Ebay for a profit, and falsely claimed to have always been opposed to the "bridge to nowhere," lied about opposing earmark spending, in reality, Wasilla received almost 12 million in federal earmarks while she was mayor, Is her claim not to have been a member of the party more reliable than top officials of the Independence Party such as Vice Chairman Dexter Clark, who says she and her husband were members before she became mayor of Wasila. She asked a librarian what the procedures were to get books banned, and then threatened to fire her because she didn't feel that she had her full support as mayor...........but that's okay with you! Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. "She asked the library how she could go about banning books," he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. "The librarian was aghast." That woman, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn't be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire Baker for not giving "full support" to the mayor.

More meaningless, mindless drivel that isn't worth intelligent commentary! But feel free to present your evidence for your last claim!

I recall Ron Brown's plane crash and the questions about Vince Foster's suicide, but to categorize them as murders would call for extraordinary evidence beyond anecdotes of conspiracy theorists. 9/11 and JFK conspiracy theorists have taken snippets of eyewitness accounts and incompetence of government officials to weave elaborate conspiracy theories, so how do we know that Clinton conspiracy theorists aren't following the same pattern of carefully crafting the evidence to fit the theory they want? And, on a large scale, how many deaths have Bush and Cheney been responsible for, considering the evidence that they lied even to Republican members of Congress like Dick Armey, to carry out the Iraq Invasion? It would certainly be more than 11. And Sarah Palin is starting to show the patterns of a typical, corrupt small town politician-control freak; how much damage could she cause in the Whitehouse that is presently beyond her reach in the Alaska Governor's Office?

Are you kidding? It didn't become a contest of ideas until the markets started to crash this week. Until now, it's been all pomp and pageantry, a contest of personalities, sordid personal histories, and odd personal beliefs. But that must also make it much more interesting, since I joined this forum for the specific purpose of getting more involved in Canadian political issues, but I keep dozing off reading federal and political issues, even though these are the ones that affect me directly. I can't help but keep going back to the U.S. political debates to read something to catch my interest.

I've heard this one before, but since you always line up on the line of scrimmage with the Republicans on every issue (point out one thing where you don't), and you named yourself after the two men who have destroyed the Republican brand and may have done irreparable harm to the nation as well, I can't accept you as anything other than a kneejerk, doctrinaire Republican apologist. There are a few others here claiming to be something other than their arguments would indicate, and it shouldn't make any difference what people claim to believe when they don't appear to apply them in public. More Republican drivel! Republicans claim to be colour blind, so they can ignore the real life misery their policies create. No surprise that won't address any of them either, and try to turn appreciation into one man's achievements into "cleverly coded racism." Maybe you can explain to me then why Barack Obama's bio page also contains this "cleverly coded racism": He went on to earn his law degree from Harvard in 1991, where he became the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review I used "intelligent" in comparision with "unintelligent" for example: George Bush, John McCain, Sarah Palin etc., not in the context that an intelligent black man is an anomaly as you are trying to imply by twisting my words around. It was also remarkable that he rose to the top from very humble beginnings, since his father left when he was young, and the family was on food stamps for some time. And considering all that, it's amazing that the Republican propaganda machine has the gall to call him an "elitist" even though their candidate has a rich trophy wife who made it possible for him to have a private jet and NINE homes scattered across the country. The real "cleverly coded racism" comes from the charges that a black man (and don't give me the crap about being bi-racial, you know very well that the majority consider him to be black regardless) is an elitist for aspirations of reaching for the top in academia -- there's your real racism! Thanks for dropping your mask a little to reveal the sordid inner workings of your mind! I'm old enough to remember where that disparaging term comes from, and it wasn't for academic achievement -- they were called uppity --------'s. It seems that term has resurfaced in Republican backrooms lately also. No, the "credit to his race term," likely first used about Joe Louis, was exclusively used to apply to black athletes, since that was the only form of achievement that was considered acceptable.

I'm not generally partial to conspiracy theories, and the lines of distinction may be blurring now that more whites are smoking crack; but 20 years ago, crack cocaine was almost exclusively an urban ghetto phenomena every bit as much as drinking malt liquor! So, what logical reasons are there for excessively penalizing one version of a drug more than other forms? There's also the side issue of why the courts are more lenient with drug offenders from middleclass and wealthier families -- sending offenders off to drug treatment centers instead of prison, as is usually the case if they come from a more modest background. Looking at the big picture, the whole War On Drugs is as big a travesty as the War On Terror, and drug abuse should have been treated as a health crisis rather than a crime problem right from the start. Your unfortunate friend in Florida may be a dealer, if she had that many different types of drugs in her possession. But even so, many addicts are forced to deal on the side or steal and burglarize homes to pay for the exorbitant cost of street drugs created by a policy that tries to cut down on supplies and make the drugs even more expensive and a more lucrative business for organized crime.

And it never occurred to you that an acronym can have more than one meaning! You have conditioned your mind to believe that every question has only one possible answer, and more than likely, you are a conspiracy theorist who believes there are no accidents or coincidences -- every event has some mysterious, secret cabal working behind the scenes to control world events. You likely have other issues that you decide what the answers are before you look at any evidence. Interesting that a google search doesn't turn up Western Independence Party in the first page of results even though this is the conclusion you jumped to! There's: "Web Inquiry Projects," "Waste Implementation Programme," "Women in Publishing," "Women in Property, and finally "Work In Progress," or alternatively "Work In Process," -- a term I recall when I was an inventory control clerk many years ago, and it refers to unfinished products in between the raw materials and finished goods stages of manufacturing. Since I don't seem to enjoy the absolute metaphysical certainty that many people walk around with, and I have changed my mind on many issues over the years, I thought this would make a good user name. But I shortened the screen name to WIP because I seemed to get a lot of responses that shortened it for me. And there's your Western Independence conspiracy! On other pages I found two bloggers who use WIP in the title, but for the record, Western Independence Party doesn't show up until page 8, even though that's the only meaning you can believe in. Could be that you are seeing Western separatists hiding under every rock and behind every tree! Every so often, people should step back and evaluate how closely their core beliefs match outside reality -- it may be time for you to do a recalibration!

Palin Derangement Syndrome is a poorly disguised example of Republicans attempting to do blame-shifting on everyone who has noticed that this woman is a ticking timebomb that's almost set to blow up in the face of desperate Republicans attempting to find a way to win an electiion after creating domestic and foreign policy disasters. There are so many absurd things about selecting Palin for high office that the extreme right wants to write it all off as persecution. There are so many crazy things about Sarah Palin's story that some interesting subtopics that should be discussed - such as her membership in a separatist party, are being crowded out by Troopergate, declared willingness to go to war with Russia over Georgia and Ukraine, linking Bin Laden to the Iraq War, lying about the bridge to nowhere and selling the plane on EBAY, believing in creationism, taking a redeye flight home to Alaska after her water broke prematurely, banning library books, opposing abortion even in cases of rape and incest, and likely many more I can't recall at the moment. The people who aren't shocked and abhorred by the prospect of having her serve as Vice President, and being a heartbeat away from the top job, are the ones who are deranged!

I'm no financial whiz, but even I can see that the latest round in defaults follows the same pattern as the crisis in sub-prime loans -- all made possible by deregulation. Many of these rules that banks and investment firms thought were interfering with business, were put in place for a reason during the 1930's, and along with deposit insurance, they were supposed to ensure confidence in the banking system. Now, it's like the 1920's all over again! I heard today that much of AIG's troubles come as a result of insuring subprime loans. When real estate prices were going up, this was a guaranteed cashcow; now they've been left holding the bag for many mortgages that have defaulted.

you are full of crap up to your eyeballs! Observing Barack Obama's milestone achievement that none of the other candidates can make a similar claim to is racism according to your doublespeak! But supporting a political party that tailored drug laws and penalties (crack cocaine vs. powdered cocaine) to specifically target minorities and fill prisons with young black men incarcerated for drug offenses is not racist according to Republican morality! Defunding school lunch programs and affirmative action programs is also not racist! But mentioning an historic first, reported by many news sources in their biographies of Barack Obama is a racist comment -- Right! Your hypocrisy has sunk to an alltime low!

Oh! And exactly how far west is Hamilton? You mindless, socialist nutjob! It's idiots like you that will keep me from going anywhere near the NDP for the rest of my life! You concocted some BS story about Bob Rae being hamstrung by debt and a weak economy left over from the Peterson Government, because the facts don't support NDP mythology! They turned Peterson's deficit into annual 10 billion dollar a year deficits, and in one term in office, Bob Rae doubled Ontario's provincial debt before he left in 95. Let's pause and reflect on the good old days of Ontario's first and last N.D.P. government: The Rae government's first budget, introduced in 1991, increased social spending to mitigate the economic slowdown and projected a record deficit of $9.1 billion. Finance Minister Floyd Laughren argued that Ontario made a decision to target the effects of the recession rather than the deficit, and said that the budget would create or protect 70,000 jobs. It targeted more money to social assistance, social housing and child benefits, and raised taxes for high-income earners while lowering rates for 700,000 low-income Ontarians.[44] A few years later, journalist Thomas Walkom described the budget as following a Keynesian orthodoxy, spending money in the public sector to stimulate employment and productivity. Unfortunately, it did not achieve its stated purpose due to the unforeseen severity of the recession. Walkom described the budget as "the worst of both worlds", angering the business community but not doing enough to provide for public relief. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Rae Yeah! Worst of both worlds is an understatement! Common sense would lead most people to scrap strategies that don't work, and try something new. But every year, the Rae Government increased taxes, increased government spending, and waited for a turnaround in the economy. Instead of creating conditions that would encourage companies to hire new staff, Rae started "Jobs Ontario", a multimillion dollar boondoggle that only provided jobs for the bureaucrats who created the program! With all that, I'm surprised that Bob Rae was allowed to reinvent himself and come close to winning in his bid to become Liberal leader. If Stephan Dion heads for exit after this election, I hope that there are other prospects available to put an end to his bid to do for Canada what he did for Ontario!

I'm not buying! It's true that Peterson hid a two billion dollar deficit until just prior to election day, but Rae's finance minister - Pink Floyd Laughren, turned it into a 10 billion dollar deficit; and doubling the size of the provincial debt, they tried to hide the size of their last budget deficit by selling government assets and moving some debts off budget -- things that would get an equivalent comptroller in industry, thrown in jail. And Mulroney wasn't a financial genius either, or he would have realized that a recession was a bad time to introduce a new sales tax. Whatever your ideology is, the facts are: Bob Rae didn't know a thing about economics, and his finance minister tried to tax his way out of annual deficits and couldn't understand why they kept getting bigger! There may not be a lot of things about Harris to warm people's hearts, but he did have enough sense to realize that tax rates in Ontario were too high and the social welfare system was becoming so much more generous than other provinces under the Rae Government, that people on the dole in other provinces were moving to Ontario just to file welfare claims.

And how many people fall through the cracks of the present system? Otherwise, I don't think health care would be an issue in this election! And abortion coverage could certainly be challenged on the basis of the states that refuse to extend medicare coverage for abortions. ONe of the scandals that dogged Mike Huckabee when he was being taken seriously for a brief moment in the Republican primaries, was that ten years ago, he refused to allow medicare coverage for a 15 year old girl who was impregnated by her father! If abortions in case of incest aren't covered in most of these Bible Belt states, how many others are going to qualify for funding?

After being away for a couple of days, I noticed that your posts have gone from being merely argumentative to being vindictive and insulting. Maybe cognitive dissonance is starting to set in now that trying to justify all the Neocon bullshit is becoming as difficult as arguing in favour of a flat earth! I don't expect you to remember my family history, but for the record, I've mentioned previously that I used to have dual citizenship when I was young, and have family living in Michigan and elsewhere -- that aside, many Canadians take an active interest in what goes on south of the border, since good times or bad times determine what happens to the economy in Canada (especially here in Ontario) and since this forum has subforums dedicated to U.S. issues, we're going to be commenting about what goes on in the U.S. whether you like it or not! And for that matter, why the hell are you on a Canadian forum in the first place? YOu have nothing good to say about this country or Canadians, and have nothing constructive to offer, so why bother? Now, I also can't help but notice that your rant did not address my main objection to the political philosophy of anti-intellectualism that pervades the religious right and the Republican Party. It doesn't matter whether you believe in more government or less government control of the economy; if you hire idiots like McCAin/Palin to run the Whitehouse, they are going to be totally dependent on discredited Neocon financial gurus like Phil Gramm and Carly Fiorina! That's all America needs right now to go right down the crapper -- another dimbulb in the Whitehouse who depends on advisers to run the country!

And what about those American families who have no private health insurance? I used to think I was a conservative; but the kind of conservatism you and others here advocate would be a return to having people dying in the streets! I know how bureaucratic and costly our healthcare system is, and the waiting lists keep getting longer year after year, regardless of who's in government; but I still want some minimal safety net that guarantees a basic level of healthcare to everyone ESPECIALLY CHILDREN, than to go to an American system where the only people guaranteed government health insurance are veterans, politicians, and retirees!

There are so many reasons to make Sarah Palin a hot topic, where do you start? If a McCain/Palin ticket wins, the odds are that, considering McCain's age and cancer history, Sarah Palin will become the most unqualified candidate to become POTUS -- since George W. Bush. And McCain isn't exactly a genius either! During one of the Republican debates, he confessed that he is more well versed in foreign affairs and military matters, than he is on economics. With what's happening now to the U.S. economy, I'm sure he wishes now that he stuck to his script and wasn't in a confessional mode of thought. Is the average American's aversion to intellectuals that extreme that they want people who are no more intelligent and better educated than they are to serve as president? I'd rather have an elitist who was smart enough to become the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, than to have a guy who still can't figure out the difference between Sunnis and Shiites; and a woman who thinks that her state's proximity to Russia makes her a foreign policy expert!

Bullcrap! The problem is Stephen Harper is no Harris! Everybody who works for the schoolboards or was on social assistance when the Harris government cut benefits can bitch about it now, but the fact is that the Bob Rae - N.D.P. government and the previous two Liberal governments almost bankrupted Ontario. Harris had to do the dirty work to make the cuts needed to balance the budget, along with cutting the excessive tax burden of Ontarians to stimulate economic growth needed to restart the economy. And let's not forget that Paul Martin was being called a financial genius for balancing the Federal Budget merely by cutting transfer payments to Ontario and the other provinces, without offering any tax relief! Martin would not have been able to balance the federal books if Ontario hadn't made the turnaround. I'm not going to laud everything Mike Harris did as Premier, but a lot of the problems in various depts. from transportation and education to consumer affairs came from the limited talent pool that Harris had to draw from to make up his Cabinet (same excuse Rae made for N.D.P. incompetence); the Tories weren't expected to win the 95 election, and the Big Blue Machine from the old days, were already retired. Now, as for Harper; this is a different type of conservative altogether! Harris stuck to bread and butter economic issues and did not want his government getting bogged down in controversial social issues; whereas Harper is following the Republican strategy of pulling all the emotional levers of patriotism, nationalism, fear of crime (last year, the crime rate dropped for the third year in a row, but you wouldn't know it based on Harper's alarmist campaign commercials), fear of terrorism, fear of homosexuals (I'm betting that some vote on definition of marriage will resurface after the election to throw a bone to all of the evangelical M.P.'s and the religious right groups like REAL WOMEN, Canadian Family Action Coalition etc.). But, maybe Harper wants to focus on crime and flag waving because he's frittered away a 13.5 billion dollar budget surplus during his brief stint as Prime Minister. The kind of conservative governing philosophy Harper follows is on parade south of the border, as eight years of Bush Republicans may have done so much damage mainly through fighting expensive foreign wars on the governments' line of credit, that at the moment, it's looking like the entire financial system is going to collapse. Give Harper a majority government, and a few more years, and Canada will be in the same mess as the Americans.

I try to ignore the talking heads who play market analysts for the networks. Same with your local financial adviser -- these guys are brokers who have a vested interest in maintaining present share values at all costs. They've been trying to minimize bad news like the collapse in U.S. real estate and soaring national debt for so long that real panic could set in and cause a total meltdown. Things would be worse than they are now if it wasn't for the sovereign wealth funds of the Saudis and the sheiks in the oil-rich emirates putting up billions to buying U.S. investments. It's questionable whether anyone on Wall Street or at the Federal Reserve can state with any degree of certainty how much risk there is to the markets if there is a collapse in the value of derivatives that were originally designed as a hedge against market losses, but are apparently being used to leverage larger purchases of investments. And we're being told that concentration of derivatives is concentrated among the the five largest banks, while the S.E.C. has never bothered to conduct much oversight of the use of derivatives: Disclosure in the brokerage industry is especially bad. Big Banks Risk All with Danger of Defaults on DerivativesMany brokerages are private and do not disclose more than their rank and serial number. The SEC collects sparse data and does not publish it. So if you want to figure out how much derivates risk your broker is exposed to, good luck! Getting the information can be like pulling teeth. * Concentrated in the hands of five major players. Nearly 97% of all U.S. bank-held derivatives are concentrated in the hands of just five major U.S. banks — JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, Wachovia and HSBC. * Far larger than assets. As you can see in the chart to the left, the pile-up of derivatives greatly exceeds the total assets of the firms. At the same time, in most cases, the default risk related to these holdings greatly exceed the banks' capital. * Big brokers are also loaded with derivatives. Merrill Lynch has $4.2 trillion. Morgan Stanley has $7.1 trillion. As best we can determine, Lehman Brothers has significantly less — $729 billion. But in proportion to its dwindling capital, its exposure seems to be among the worst. http://www.marketoracle.org/Article6275.html

The dream of having a Beatles reunion died when John Lennon was shot in 1980; but now the members of classic rock bands of the 60's and 70's are reaching the point where they can die of natural causes. If they are lifelong smokers, then they are at risk of dying early of cancer or heart disease. Now, with the passing of Rick Wright, there won't be a complete Pink Floyd reunion. The original four did one show together back in 2005, but decided against a follow-up tour, and scrapped plans of recording new music together. Too late now: Richard Wright, a founding member of the rock group Pink Floyd, died Monday. He was 65. Pink Floyd's spokesman Doug Wright, who is not related to the artist, said Wright died after a battle with cancer at his home in Britain. He says the band member's family did not want to give more details about his death. http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/080915/..._richard_wright

Well, Asian stockmarkets didn't take the news of Lehman Bros. bankruptcy and the firesale at Merrill Lynch too well, so I wouldn't expect a turnaround on Wall Street.

I hope you're wrong on this one! Things will be bad enough without having a McCain/Palin presidency!