We are just ending the worst real estate slump in 40 years. The most recent boom peaked in 2005-06 and then the bottom dropped out.

The incomprehensible murder of 20 children in Connecticut can no more be explained than why more than 5,000 children have cancer and are being treated at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.

Republicans in Congress are so stupid. President Barack Obama set the trap; they walked in. They think Obama’s demand to tax the “rich” is about increasing government revenues, even though he’s said it’s not. The Republicans will cave in again because government spending has shrunk only three times in 62 years: 1954, 1965 and lastly in 2010 when the tea party ascended. The Democratic Party has been the “party of the rich” for decades, led by rich media manipulators.

After losing his 99th consecutive game, Charlie Brown, the great American philosopher of "Peanuts," hangs his head.

My first job was delivering the weekly Shopping News door-to-door in the 1950s. I walked neighborhoods with a double bag, front and back filled with “newspapers” carrying ads only. The Shopping News was bought by the San Diego Independent or possibly San Diego Daily Journal. My brother delivered the Journal until the Evening Tribune bought it in 1950. When I was 11, I got a bike and took over delivering the Evening Tribune.

How a high school dropout left an estate of around $28 million in today’s dollars seems profoundly unfair to anti-capitalists everywhere.

The “American people” want compromise, says The New York Times. The “American people” want a balanced budget, say the Republicans. The “American people” want free medical care, a free college education, free contraceptives, free food stamps, free mass transit, free immigration, and free or partly free housing, say the Democrats (and Democrats want Republicans to go along to get along). Everyone with an agenda claims to speak for the “American people.”

On May 7, 1931, the most sensational manhunt in New York history came to a climax.