I think it’s a combination of the second, third and fourth reasons with the first reason being the only difference between now and all of the other times in history when the other three circumstances were also applicable.

I’m sure that 40 years ago women would have seemed more unhappy than women forty years before that seemed to be in retrospect, but nobody would have asked. 

As I always do, to catch the local weather forecast I turned on the TV and tuned to a local channel while dressing for work. Since I don’t leave for work until 7:25 the channel always goes into the network morning "news" (and I use that term loosely) exploits before I leave.

This morning it was the local CBS affiliate that I tuned to. When the CBS Early Show came on the lead story was of course the blatant sensationalization of David Letterman’s sex life. I had to hear several minutes of it before I could get to the remote in the kitchen. In those several minutes I never heard a single mention of the extortionist who was employed by CBS. 

Rather than just turn the TV off as I normally would when one of these morning tabloids comes on, out of curiosity I tuned it instead to NBC to see if and how they were "covering" it. Meredith (bless her heart she does try to maintain her news reporter integrity) did indeed lead off with the truly criminal, and therefore legitimately newsworthy, extortion but it wasn’t long before it became a pulpit from which Halderman’s attorney could avow that they were going to prove that there was sexual harassment going on, and of course that segued into a discussion of the speculated sexual conduct of David Letterman.

Hey people!! If there was sexual harassment going on then let the women upon whom it was perpetrated step up, but THIS ISN’T ABOUT SEXUAL HARASSMENT UNTIL THEY DO SO!! And even if Halderman’s attorney’s sufficiently motivate some to do so, this original case is ABOUT EXTORTION.

I work in law enforcement and the last I heard sexual harassment wasn’t legal grounds for extortion.

"Polanski is getting special treatment because he is a famous moviemaker."

Not just moviemakers…………O.J. Simpson, Michael Jackson……….. happens all the time.

I think the media’s reaction to this is the most "Telling" thing about the it. Since when is it more "Newsworthy" in this country that an unmarried man had consentual sex with a co-worker or even an employee than that a high level producer in the news department of a major network was trying to extort millions of dollars from him?

Just another thing for which we have to thank the evangelical right wingnuts and their corproate media buddies. 

Where was all this outrage when Bush was selling out our jobs to China so that Wall Street could get richer? 

Why did we only start counting the employment casualties after Wall Street’s corruption starting costing the financial industry jobs?

I think you hit the nail on the head rocky. What this doll does is "normalize" homelessness. It says to these privileged young ladies whose parents can afford the dolls and accessories that the homeless are one this country’s five social classes. There are "The Wealthy", "The Comfortably Well Off",  (no more Middle Class), "The Working Poor", "The Unemployed Poor", and "The Homeless".

Unless something is done about the republicans party’s corporatism we may actually find ourselves devolving into a caste system. 

The "living" qualification is reminding me of so many that we’ve lost. 

Aren’t we supposed to have free enterprise in this country? Doesn’t that mean we should be free to buy insurance from whomever can give us what we want for the least cost? When government collusion with corporations gives them the advantage over the citizens it’s no longer free enterprise.

People keep spouting off about "government taking over 1/6 of our economy". The government took over our ENTIRE economy when the republicans started giving corporate welfare and tax breaks to corporations that put Americans out of work and out of health care benefits so that the corporate execs could get richer off of cheap foreign labor. Then they deregulated Wall Street so the financial industry could defraud everybody out of their retirement funds.

It’s another symptom of the tumorous greed that’s metastasized throughout our country when the health of it’s economy depends on the illness of it’s people.  

I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t aware of it. I think it  became most glaringly unavoidable for me when in 1963 a number of smaller schools in our area of the country were consolidated and we all lost the comfort of interacting primarily with other children that we’d grown up with.

When we were all thrown together the clicques started forming and the factors that decided which group you qualified for were where you lived, how well you dressed and what your parents’ "Social Standing" in the county seat (were the schools were consolidated to).

For a while in the late sixties and early seventies it seemed that the huge gap between the haves and the have nots was beginning to close. Then came the eighties and that chasm has been getting wider and deeper ever since.

"but I prefer to let life, fate and justice do the dirty work for me."

I’d accept some help from Congress if they’d just investigate blatant war crimes as vigorously as they did some elusive "White Water".

"Suzanne I’ll ask you also - yes Obama is 1/2 white so why did he run as the first African American President?"

  By C Hardy on 09/17/2009 9:49 am

What would that have accomplished other than an even bigger racial backlash? To bigots all that matters is the color of his skin and he certainly didn’t need them to start disparaging him for the audacity of "trying to pass".