Some topics suggested for the next time we meet

People Aren't Smart Enough for Democracy to Flourish, Scientists Say

The research, led by David Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell University, shows that incompetent people are inherently unable to judge the competence of other people, or the quality of those people's ideas. For example, if people lack expertise on tax reform, it is very difficult for them to identify the candidates who are actual experts. They simply lack the mental tools needed to make meaningful judgments.

By Naomi Wolf
The NDAA: a clear and present danger to American liberty

The NDAA grants the president the power to kidnap any American anywhere in the United States and hold him or her in prison forever without trial. The president's own signing statement, incredibly, confirmed that he had that power.

By John Nichols
Rush Limbaugh Owes Democracy an Apology

Limbaugh attacked Fluke for speaking up before Congress on an issue of national concern. Fluke stepped into the limelight not as an entertainer or a political player. She did not seek fame or fortune. She spoke up as a citizen. And that's what is so unsettling about Limbaugh's crude language and cruder stance as this controversial incident has exploded.

By Robert Reich
Bye Bye American Pie: The Challenge of the Productivity Revolution

Many of the gains are distributed narrowly in the form of profits to owners, and fat compensation packages to the "talent." The share of the gains going to everyone else in the form of wages and salaries has been shrinking. It's now the smallest since the government began keeping track in 1947. If the trend continues, inequality will become ever more extreme.

How Was It That So Many Members of Our Middle Class Were Financially Crushed?
CDOs were a clever version of a Ponzi scheme primarily because they provided ever more markets & investors & allowed banks to ever more profitably leverage their exposure, while brokers continued to get their lavish bonuses, thereby allowing everyone to ignore the inevitable, keeping their heads in the sand for yet another profitable day, which they all did, until the collapse in home prices drove the gravytrain off da tracks.