1. Fucking from Behind

2. Kucinich Leads Rejection of Bailout Scam

3. Unfettered Capitalism Fails

4. The End of the Reagan Revolution

5. Republican Capitalist Ideology

6. Armageddon Monday

"I Wanna Be Your Back Door Man"

What's Sex Without Some Grit?

I often let my fantasies run wild in bed. Right before the moment of orgasm I could be thinking of anyone from Angelina Jolie to a random guy from work, or a snippet of girl-on-girl action I saw on YouPorn.

But recently I got a shock when I closed my eyes when I was with a new man and the person who popped into my head was my ex, Charles.

I'm not sure whether it's pheromones, facial recognition or some kind of twisted Darwinian logic, but for some reason it's often the guys who are least well-suited emotionally who fit the bill sexually. Charles was clearly bad for me, yet I was was irresistibly drawn to him.

People often make generalisations that women want romance, and men want gritty sex.

This may be true in some cases, but personally, when I meet a new man, my first thought once we are intimate is: how long before I can start to get kinky without scaring the hell out of him? Charles didn't run, even when I pulled out the male sex toys. In fact, he took control.

We didn't have long chats about our feelings, or take sensual bubble baths together. But he understood that I want rape fantasies, not rose petals. I crave hair pulling, nail-scratching, heart-pounding sex.

He used to text me in the middle of the afternoon with explicit instructions about what to wear usually very tall stilettos, a corset and lacy knickers. He would describe in detail how he planned to bend me over the chair, spanking me and telling me that how much I loved it. And I did.

My dates since Charles haven't quite matched up. I've tried to re-create our hot afternoons, most recently by asking a lovely British man who adores me to talk dirty in the heat of the moment. "Baby, how does that feel?" I asked, as I climbed on top of him. And what was his response? "Rather inviting".

Attraction is complex, and often unconscious. Since I'm so used to taking control in every other social and sexual situation, I'm drawn to men who make me feel vulnerable and know how to take charge. And because Charles was 6ft 5in and lean, we were a great match physically.

I have had ex-boyfriends tell me that they were freaked out by the idea of BDSM-style sex because it "wasn't intimate".

But I think that the most intimate moments happen naturally, when you have a brilliant conversation, catch the flu for the first time and take care of each other, or brave the comfortable silence during a car road trip.

Trite romantic rituals like Valentine's Day and moonlit cruises don't turn me on they leave me cold because they seem so forced. I've even tried Tantric sex, and I just find it boring. Who the hell has the time?

I'm much more into the spontaneous, filthy banter that Charles and I perfected. Still, I haven't given up on the new guy.

Last night, when we were at dinner at he told me how lovely I was, I whispered: "Actually, I can be a filthy slut. Fancy tying me to the bed face down and spanking me?"

He smiled and raised an eyebrow. "That sounds lovely, darling. We'll definitely do that after the coffee."

Hey, it's a start.

Dennis Kucinich Leads Rejection of Bailout Scam

This bill will provide for a $700 billion bailout of Wall Street. It has provisions in it where it talks about helping homeowners, but when you read the fine print, you see it has language like “may” instead of “shall” and “encouraging” instead of “mandating” help for the millions of homeowners who are worried right now about whether they’re going to lose their home. There’s no help for them in this.

So what we have here is a rescue plan that essentially gives all the speculators a bailout and puts the bad debts in the custody of the government.

The president of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank has said that this plan could create a fiscal chasm, says that the problem isn’t tight monetary policy, it’s the reckless behavior of some of these investors who have now found themselves in a position where a government bailout is going to help reward their bad behavior.

I reject the underlying premise that we needed this bill. And as a matter of fact, that we’re putting this up before an adjournment in an election season shows that Congress is being put under extraordinary pressure to bail out Wall Street.

We haven’t looked at any alternatives, Amy. This is—you know, it isn’t as though, if you had a liquidity crisis, that—you know, a real one—that you’d start to look at all the alternatives.

We haven’t done that. We have a bill here, a bill of more than a hundred pages, that we haven’t had a single hearing on the bill, you know—on the concept, yes, on what Paulson and Bernanke asked for initially. But, you know, we need to have hearings on this.

There’s 400 economists and three Nobel Prize-winning economists who have said, “Whoa, wait a minute! What are you doing? Why are you rushing this?” You know, this thing doesn’t smell right, frankly.

Congress better get ready with a plan B. If this thing goes down, we need to find a way to help Wall Street pay for its own problems.

You can do that with a 20—25 percent stock transfer tax, cancellation of dividends. You know, make the shareholders and the investors have to pay for the funny business that was going on on Wall Street.

Why make the taxpayers pay? You know, the very underlying idea of this needs to be challenged, and frankly, there hasn’t been enough of that going on.

What we have is a transfer of wealth, actually. It’s a continuation of a transfer of wealth.

This whole government has become nothing more than a big machine that transfers the wealth upwards with our tax policies, our energy policies, with this fiscal policies, with the war.

All the wealth of the country goes from the pockets of the people into the hands of a few.

This is a very dangerous moment. You know, it’s the biggest amount of injection of capital by the government in a single time since the New Deal. And frankly, there is no trickle down here. There’s just rewarding bad behavior.

Unfettered Capitalism Fails

The result of unfettered capitalism's fatal flaw - unbridled greed in a rigged system that rewards the few at the expense of most others.

First an explanation of how it works. Free-wheeling, "free market" Chicago School fundamentalism the way economist Milton Friedman championed it in his 1962 book "Capitalism and Freedom" and taught it to students for decades.

He believed that government's sole function is "to protect our freedom both from (outside) enemies....and from our fellow-citizens."

Preserve law and order. Enforce private contracts. Protect private property and "foster competitive (unregulated) markets." Everything else in public hands is "socialism....blasphemy." Not to be tolerated.

He said "free markets" work best. Unfettered by rules, regulations, onerous taxes or any at all, trade barriers, entrenched interests, and human interference. That anything government does, business does better, so let it.

That the best government is one that governs least. That public wealth should be in private hands.

The accumulation of profits unrestrained. Corporate taxes abolished. Social services also, and that "economic freedom is an end to itself....and an indispensable means toward (achieving) political freedom."

He called most all government interference a restriction of freedom. Opposed foreign aid. Subsidies.

Import quotas and tariffs, and illicit drug laws for being a subsidy to organized crime, but he found no fault with major banks laundering their profits. He believed business should be unrestrained in maximizing them, even the illegal kind apparently.

He opposed the minimum wage and right of unions to bargain collectively on equal terms with management. He believed high wages and benefits harm everyone. They raise prices, and in the end, hurt workers as well as management.

He called Social Security "The Biggest Ponzi Scheme on Earth," even though it's been the most effective poverty reduction program ever for millions of seniors who'd be desperate without it. Especially today given a deepening economic crisis.

The nation's social safety net disappearing, and heading everyone toward managing on his or her own. Dependent on their ingenuity, resources, and good fortune.

Milton Friedman's ideal world. For those who can't make it, it's their own fault. It's everyone for him or herself in his judgment, and let the devil take the hindmost.

The End of the Reagan Revolution

With the failure today of the $700bn economic bail-out package before Congress, the Reagan Revolution died.

Allowing this crisis to continue without any viable alternative represents the end of an era for the Republican party. With uncertainty growing in a market built on expectations, our economic woes will worsen.

Ironically, as this crisis expands and continues to collapse major corporations, Americans will demand greater government intervention.

A party whose platform opposes nearly any proposal that uses government as the medicine for a financial disease will not be able to survive this crisis.

Politicians voted today by putting their fingers to the wind, and used ideology rather than expert advice to determine their position.

John McCain, who recently gave himself credit for suspending his campaign and shoring up House Republican support for the bill, boarded his plane without comment upon hearing of the bill's failure.

And while Main Street's short-term cynicism about Bush's proposal may have been satisfied, such reservations on the part of the public was the result of a poor marketing job by an unpopular president, and ultimately Americans will hold accountable politicians who are seen as failing to rescue them from this crisis.

America is waking up to the fact that the brand of laissez-faire capitalism that has guided America since the Reagan Revolution is a farce.

Everyone was saying it, but no businessperson really believed in it when it came to their own family. As Paul Krugman recently remarked: "Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, there are no libertarians in a financial crisis."

Few people are willing to allow 35% unemployment and economic disaster to stand firm on the very principles that likely triggered this mess.

It is true that over the long run, even if we did nothing America's markets would recover, and we would once again enjoy prosperity. But as John Maynard Keynes pointed out during our last great financial disaster: "In the long run, we're all dead."

Republican Capitalist Ideology

In keeping with the tradition of a party that has one policy solution to all economic ills -- cutting taxes on the wealthy -- the conservatives who bucked their leaders also suggested cutting capital gains taxes, even if only on a temporary basis.

It's a triumph of ideology over common sense. We've seen stock markets tanking, as investors flee like rats from a sinking ship, seeking safer ground in commodities, which have gone through the roof (oil prices have been moderated somewhat by expectations of a long slowdown that would cut demand).

A tax holiday on capital gains would only encourage those investors with steely nerves (and gains) who are staying in the market to join the herd, getting out while it's tax-free to do so. That can only send the already sky-high prices for food, energy and everything else even higher into the stratosphere.

Ordinary working people would end up paying on both sides of the deal -- getting soaked for Wall Street's Reckless Lending Insurance and then paying through the nose to put food on the table.

Adding insult to injury is the third leg of the "alternative" bailout plan: more deregulation of the financial sector.

That's nothing short of breathtaking in its audacity. It was a lax regulatory environment that brought us to the verge of collapse in the first place.

Exotic security-backed loans -- loans that didn't conform to the standards in place for banks that held deposits, including subprime loans, mortgages given to people who misstated their income and loans with heavy prepayment penalties and huge balloon payments -- are, as one would expect, faring far worse than the kinds of traditional loans that are regulated by the Federal Housing Authority or backed by Fannie Mae.

Regulations passed by Congress only three months ago, as the depth of the meltdown had become clear, made "coercing a real estate appraiser to misstate a home's value" and "making a loan without regard to borrowers' ability to repay the loan from income and assets other than the home's value" a no-no.

If similar commonsense regulations had been in place over the past decade, the run-up of the real estate market wouldn't have been as frenzied, and we wouldn't see the skyrocketing number of foreclosures we're witnessing today.

Again, none of this is to suggest that Americans should shed a tear for the demise of the compromise deal struck between Treasury Secretary Paulson and the Bush administration -- it was a bad deal that deserved to go down in flames.

But it's also becoming increasingly evident that some sort of intervention is necessary to prevent the crisis from spreading through the entire global economy.

Rather than pugnaciously cling to a failed ideology by heaping lucre on the wealthiest in the hope that it trickles down to the rest of us, Congress should be going back to the drawing board and coming up with a bailout plan rooted in a modicum of economic justice.

The House conservatives who have proven to be such a fly in the ointment are trying to go the other way -- cooking up a plan that will only deepen Main Street's pain in the name of saving it from Wall Street's predations.

Armageddon Monday

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi looked ashen as she faced reporters Monday afternoon, the stock markets plunging on news that the House had defeated, 228-205, a $700 billion bailout of the U.S. financial system.

"What happened today cannot stand," Pelosi said. "We must move forward, and I hope that the markets will take that message."

The markets did not. They plummeted as two-thirds of Republicans and more than a third of Democrats voted no.

Senate leaders quickly stepped forward to project an aura of calm. The two leading Senate negotiators, Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd, D-Conn., and Judd Gregg, R-N.H., promised that while no votes would happen over the Jewish holiday today, even as markets remain open, Congress will not leave without taking action.

"We're going to stay here until we get it fixed," Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell promised. "It is inappropriate to fix blame. What we want to do is fix the problem."

But no one could outline a path forward. "I can't give you an answer at this point," McConnell said. "It's simply unknown."

Telephone calls from President Bush went unheeded. Bush is now poisonous on Capitol Hill. Both parties share profound outrage at the crisis on his watch. There is little faith that an administration that oversaw the events leading to the crisis can fix it now.

Like the boy who cried wolf, said Farr, "Bush just has no credibility. When he ran around saying the sky was falling, nobody believed it. Now we're in a domestic crisis when the government needs credibility."

Pelosi, a fierce opponent of the Iraq war, is convinced that the risk of assuming Bush has it wrong this time is too great.

She went on the floor to recall in the starkest terms the warning Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, whom she called "one of the foremost authorities on the Great Depression," had delivered to her when he pleaded for the bailout, describing credit meltdown as a once-in-a-century event to drive home its peril.

Pelosi described her shock at the warning and her outrage at the price tag. Cornered by events and with just days to act and forced to rely on an administration she loathes, Pelosi had to accept the broad outlines of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's proposed fix.

Leaders in both parties changed the bill as much as they could. But in the end, Pelosi could not pass the bill with her own party's votes.