This post is written as part of AOL Money & Finance's Best & Worst 2006. If you think that Britney Spears makes too much money, cast your vote.

Poor Britney Spears, picked on for her parenting gaffes and apparent lack of social graces. But award-winning pop singer and dancer Spears has sold more than 70 million albums worldwide, making her one of the most successful female artists ever.

Born in Mississippi, she rose to prominence as a member of the New Mickey Mouse Club, such hit songs as "Oops, I Did It Again," and for her very successful Pepsi commercials, which reportedly earned her more than $7 million. In 2003 Forbes called her the most powerful celebrity in the world. Antics such as appearing nude on magazine covers, appearing seemingly nude in public performances, and her infamous kiss with Madonna during the 2005 MTV Music Video Awards have brought her criticism from the parents of her legions of preteen fans, many of whom look to her as a role model; Spears has denied being a role model.

In early 2004 she was very briefly married to a childhood friend, and then married dancer Kevin Federline later that year. Spears and Federline had two children before Spears filed for divorce in late 2006. Despite her break to have a family, the Britney Spears brand continued to prosper, with a highly popular perfume, Curious, released in 2004, which reportedly made about $100 million. A Britney Spears best-of album was also released in 2004, and a comeback album is reportedly planned for release in 2007.

This post is written as part of AOL Money & Finance's Best & Worst 2006. If you believe Paris Hilton makes too much money, cast your vote.

Socialite, singer, actress, and model, Paris Hilton is an heiress to the Hilton Hotel fortune. Already a celebrity in Manhattan and Los Angeles nightlife circles, she came to wide attention for starring in the reality television program The Simple Life, and for the infamous sex video that was leaked onto the Internet. She is also the niece of former child stars Kim and Kyle Richards, who appeared in the film Escape to Witch Mountain, and also distantly related to actresses Zsa Zsa Gabor and Elizabeth Taylor.

Hilton grew up in homes in Beverly Hills and the Hamptons, as well as a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in Manhattan. She dropped out of high school, but earned a GED, and did not go on to college. Besides starring in The Simple Life, she has also had cameo appearances in television programs such as The OC and Veronica Mars, in music videos by Eminem and John Oates, starred in a TV commercial for the Carl's Jr. burger restaurant chain, and made numerous appearances at red carpet events. Her role in the film House of Wax earned her a Worst Supporting Actress Razzie Award in 2005.

She is the founder of Heiress Records, a record label whose only release is a Paris Hilton album. Her other projects include a line of jewelry, a chain of nightclubs, and a New York Times bestselling book of advice for would-be heiresses. In 2004 she participated in a campaign to encourage young people to vote, though it was later revealed that she hadn't bothered to register to vote herself.

While she has been quoted comparing herself to blonde icons Princess Diana and Marilyn Monroe, she will reportedly appear in the 2007 Guinness Book of World Records as the world's most overrated celebrity.

This post is written as part of AOL Money & Finance's Best & Worst 2006. If you think that Tom Cruise makes too much money, cast your vote.

Long-considered one of the big guns in Hollywood, Golden Globe Award-winning actor and producer Tom Cruise is the only actor to have six consecutive $100 million plus blockbusters to his credit.

His acting career began when he was sidelined from the high-school wrestling team by an injury and he auditioned for and won a role in the school production of Guys and Dolls. He became a star after dancing in his underwear in the 1983 film Risky Business, for which he reportedly earned a measly $75,000. After 1986's Top Gun put Cruise in the six-figure salary range, he earned his first Razzie Award nomination for 1988's Cocktail. Critically acclaimed Rain Man, Days of Thunder, and A Few Good Men followed. In 1996 he starred in and produced Mission Impossible, the first in the blockbuster franchise, and earned an Academy Award nomination for his role in Jerry Maguire. Later blockbusters include Minority Report, The Last Samurai, and War of the Worlds (which reportedly earned him $70 million plus a percentage of the profits, as well as more Razzie nominations).

But in recent years his personal life has begun to attract more attention than his film roles, notably Cruise's very public advocacy of Scientology and anti-psychiatry statements, coupled with the tabloid speculation about his romantic relationships. In May 2005, during an interview on the Oprah Winfrey Show, Cruise unexpectedly leaped onto the couch to profess his love for Katie Holmes, an incident that was voted #1 of 2005's Most Surprising Television Moments on a countdown on E!. Economic damage due to Cruise's controversial public behavior and views was cited as one reason for the end of the 14-year relationship between Cruise's production company and Paramount Pictures.

This post is written as part of AOL Money & Finance's Best & Worst 2006. If this post convinces you that Ford can make a comeback, cast your vote.

Recently I wrote a blog post about some of the nice things Ford Motor Company (NYSE: F) is doing. It was just an overview and the article was cursory at best. A member of our excellent editing staff suggested that I might have readers who want a bit more explanation of just what has happened with Ford's stock market value over the last year. I think that for an even better perspective, I'll need to take you back ... way, way back....

Ford Motor Company's stock value entered this decade at $29.30 (the actual per share value was $53.51 but there's a split adjustment factored in). By the end of 2000 Ford stock had slipped to $23.44. One year later the shares had deflated to $15.95 and by the end of 2002 investors were viewing in amazement a stock value of just $9.58. In 2003 Ford took an upswing and shares ended that year at $16.18. But 2004 ended at $14.80, 2005 nearly halved that value to $7.90, and 2006 is shaping up to finish with Ford Motor Company shares close to today's ending price of $8.13. Two factors that must be considered when viewing this historical trend are: In 2000 Ford's daily share trading volume was in the range of 3,300,000, whereas yesterday's trading volume for Ford was over ten times that much at 30,530,400 shares. How do total share availability and volume traded affect the overall price? I'll honestly tell you, that information is just plain "over my head."

This post is written as part of AOL Money & Finance's Best & Worst 2006. If you are rooting for Whole Foods, cast your vote.

We want, with everything in us, to love Whole Foods Market, Inc. (NASDAQ:WFMI). Not just the company's lovely aisles full of delicious organic and natural foods, environmentally friendly diapers, and every vitamin under the sun. We want to love the stock.

But the stock doesn't always love us back. And, despite posting significant sales and profit increases, investors were highly disappointed with the company's not-quite-as-good-as-expected growth. On November 3, Whole Foods went from healthy investor darling to the simple carbohydrate of the grocery stock universe: burn fast, flame out.

You could wail and moan, and join the market selling your WFMI like organic oatmeal-spelt hotcakes. Or you could stay the course. Buy in this period of relative value (at 35x earnings, the stock isn't what you'd call cheap, but it's more realm-of-possibility than the +30-ish% level of six weeks ago). Believe in healthy.

Here are some reasons to continue to believe in Whole Foods:

This post is written as part of AOL Money & Finance's Best & Worst 2006. If you're a doughnut lover rooting for Krispy Kreme's comeback, cast your vote for it.

Poor Krispy Kreme. People once stood in line for store openings to get their free doughnuts, and the company and brand were the darling of markets and growing well. Who doesn't love a doughnut?

But Krispy Kreme (NYSE:KKD) has fallen from its perch and been dunked in the hot oil of reality: over the past few years the growth of the low-carb awareness -- in the form of Atkins, South Beach, Sugar Busters, and other diets that caused people to cut simple carbohydrates down or out of their diets -- was widespread. Even bread companies complained about the dip in sales.

Then the doughnut company got hit by a second health punch in the form of health awareness about trans fatty acids.

You want to tell customers that they should have realized well before all this that doughnuts obviously aren't good for you? Did anyone seriously think eating doughnuts was somehow not going be a dietary no-no? Were doughnut-eating customers so naive that when they were told these things were unhealthy they suddenly gave them up? If so, it might be a victory for public health awareness, but you have to wonder what kind of a rock Krispy Kreme's previous customers were under.

You want to root for Krispy Kreme to make a comeback, because really, we all like doughnuts. Sure they're not good for us, but neither is anything else that's truly fun in the world. Many of us secret doughnut lovers will be happy to put in some extra treadmill time if Krispy Kreme can come to grips with its deserters and continue to give us a standard glazed doughnut. Hang in there guys!

This post is written as part of AOL Money & Finance's Best & Worst 2006. Cast your vote for the most overused buzzword.

Thanks to Regulation FD (for "fair disclosure"), average investors have won the right to listen to the often torturous dance between Wall Street analysts and publicly traded companies during earnings season. When things go right, there are shouts of "great quarter guys," but when someone asks a particularly long-winded or controversial question, they usually say that they will "take it (their answer) offline." Executives promise to get back to the analyst "offline" if they don't feel like answering their questions. Like most buzzwords, this phrase doesn't say what the speaker really means.

Unfortunately its popularity seems to be skyrocketing. I mean, look at this search on the SeekingAlpha site. My theory is that some PR or IR person told a CEO: "Look, you may think the analyst is a moron, but calling him a moron is counterproductive in the long-run." Analysts have found it more useful to say "I'll take it offline" rather than "I wonder what load of bull you will give me to this insightful question."

This post is written as part of AOL Money & Finance's Best & Worst 2006. Cast your vote for the most overused buzzword.

On election night, CNN had a gaggle of pundits and bloggers opining about the Democratic takeover of the U.S. House and Senate. Among the throng was a journalist from Newsweek. That was amazing. On election night, a time when CNN gets big ratings, the Time Warner (NYSE:TWX)-owned network turned to someone who works for a publication that is a fierce rival of its own Time magazine. It makes one wonder, whatever happened to corporate synergies?

Executives repeated that phrase ad nauseam during the go-go 90s. I always got the impression that big investors took these estimates with a grain -- make that a truckload -- of salt. Synergy was the main selling point of the Time Warner-AOL merger. Then, the word took off in various spellings, including the utility Cinergy, now a part of Duke Energy (NYSE:DUK). There's Corporate Synergies, a benefits consulting company based in New Jersey, and Idaho-based Provider Synergies, which manages company spending on drugs.

The catch phrase resurfaced this year when General Motors Corporation (NYSE:GM) mulled over an alliance with Renault SA and Nissan Motor Corp. Bloomberg News reported that "GM had figured an alliance would cut its purchasing costs by $1 billion to $2 billion; the Renault estimate was much higher, a person familiar with the talks said."

US Airways (NYSE:LCC) estimated that it could get "actual savings" of $1.65 billion over two years by taking over rival Delta Air Lines, Inc. Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) pointed out in its press release announcing the YouTube deal that the video sharing site "will operate independently to preserve its successful brand and passionate community." It will be interesting to see if everyone remains a happy Google family in the coming years.

Jonathan Berr is the editor of http://www.desperateinvestors.com.

This post is written as part of AOL Money & Finance's Best & Worst 2006. Cast your vote for the most overused buzzword.

The housing bubble has hit close to home for me, literally. Someone has been trying to sell a house down the street from me for about five months. That's a sea change from two or three years ago when properties in my neighborhood seemed to get snapped up the minute someone slapped a for-sale sign on their lawns. Often we suburbanites would gasp in amazement at the prices that people got for homes similar to ours. Even with this market uncertainty, I bet I could get double the price I paid for my house -- which is hardly a McMansion -- if I wanted to sell. The flip side is that I would have to pay a high price for a new house. But even though I have seen the phenomena first hand, I hate the phrase "housing bubble." Much like Web 2.0, it has evolved this year into a vague buzzword that probably confuses most average investors. The National Association of Realtors argues that there's no bubble. "We've never seen a housing bubble, which -- if we compare to stock bubbles -- would be a prolonged double-digit collapse from unsustainable prices," said Walter Molony, an NAR spokesman, in an email interview. "What we have is a deflating balloon."

Economists including Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, disagree. Executives at Toll Brothers, Inc. (NYSE:TOL) and other home builders have spoken of a slowdown, even though they seem to be privately more optimistic, according to the AP. So what's going on? I wish I knew. There is no doubt that homes aren't fetching the prices that they did and that people like my neighbor are having more difficulty selling. Prices for existing homes fell at a record rate in October, their third straight monthly decline. I tried and failed to come up with a better catch phrase than housing bubble. "Those people had to be idiots to pay THAT much for THAT house" and "Do you believe how much our house is worth today?" just don't have the same ring to them.

Jonathan Berr is the editor of the blog http://www.desperateinvestors.com.

This post is written as part of AOL Money & Finance's Best & Worst of 2006. Cast your vote for the most overused buzzword.

Whenever I read the term "Web 2.0," the hairs on the back of my neck stand at attention. I then grab a handful of antacid tablets to calm my stomach. Sure, I might be exaggerating slightly, but there is no doubt that Web 2.0 is one of the worst bits of jargon ever (to learn how the buzzword was created, click here).

Thanks to acquisitions of companies like YouTube (by Google), Jotspot (by Google) and the rumored Facebook-Yahoo merger talks, the term spread through the media this year like a virus. Check out these searches for Web 2.0 on BusinessWeek, The New York Times, and especially Google. Five thousand people were turned away from the recent Web 2.0 conference -- dubbed a summit this year -- in San Francisco.

The Web 2.0 hoopla may have reached its nadir in August when BusinessWeek published its Valley Boys cover story, which was notable for breathless statements like: "So far, Digg is breaking even on an estimated $3 million annually in revenues. Nonetheless, people in the know say Digg is easily worth $200 million." Everyone seems to agree that Web 2.0 is here to stay.

This post is written as part of AOL Money & Finance's Best & Worst 2006. Vote for Michael Dell's fall from grace or see other nominees.

Dell Inc. (NASDAQ:DELL) has had a rocky year. And when Dell has a bad year, you can be sure Michael Dell, its founder, chairman and biggest shareholder, has had a rocky year as well.

Last summer Dell (the company and the man, no doubt) struggled with an embarrassing problem involving exploding laptop batteries. Ultimately, it had to recall more than 4 million laptops that contained batteries made by Sony Corporation (NASDAQ:SNE).

Aside from that expensive little gaffe -- which plagued other laptop manufacturers as well -- Dell also had to confront weak sales in the U.S. Not only does the company face an ongoing fierce price war (heard about those $99 laptops at Wal-Mart, anyone?), but arch rival Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE:HPQ) has been coming on strong. In October, Dell lost its rank as the No. 1 U.S. PC maker to HP.

The company has also been under Securities and Exchange Commission investigation for its accounting and in mid-November had to announce an earnings delay, which pummeled the shares.

This post is written as part of AOL Money & Finance's Best & Worst 2006. Vote for Mel Gibson's fall from grace or see other nominees in this category.

Remember when Mel Gibson was accused of being an anti-Semite -- before everyone learned that he actually was an anti-Semite? Back when a little negative depiction in Passion of the Christ was the worst of it? I bet Mel Gibson remembers those days, and looks back to the then-baseless accusations with fondness.

Now, when people accuse Gibson of hating Jews, they have a drunken tirade of truth at which to point. And Gibson has a huge hole to climb out of. He's such a "persona non grata" that some pundits are asking if The Walt Disney Company (NYSE:DIS) should really be including Mel's visage in the marketing for his new movie, Apocalypto, released December 8.

Mel Gibson fell so hard this year, from paragon of family virtues to alcoholic bigot, that he famously commiserated with Michael Richards after he got in trouble for using the oh-so-very-bad "N-word" in a comic bit gone wrong.

This post is written as part of AOL Money & Finance's Best & Worst 2006. Vote for Patricia Dunn's fall from grace or see other nominees in this category.

If you were to look back at this year's biggest management foibles and try to rate the largest, which would you choose? How about former Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE:HPQ) chair Patricia Dunn? I would count her as the company leader who fell from grace hardest this year. The former chairwoman of one of Silicon Valley's most respected companies was embroiled -- and still is -- in a corporate spying scandal, as the former chair tried to ferret out press leaks from inside her own board of directors. She subsequently quit her post and was grilled on Capitol Hill in front of the U.S. Congress -- and the situation is not resolved yet.

Dunn seemed to be on a roll when she received the Financial Woman's Association of San Francisco's "Financial Woman of the Year" award in 2001, and when she subsequently succeeded Carly Fiorina as CEO of HP. But resigning as chair of the board in September didn't stop her from being charged in October by the state of California on four felony charges, including conspiracy and identity theft. If the scandal and the indictments weren't enough, Dunn, a survivor of both breast and ovarian cancer, discovered that the latter cancer had returned. She continues to undergo treatment.

From one of the top positions in the tech industry to a beleaguered witness, Patty Dunn gets my vote as the hardest-hit, "fallen from grace" corporate executive of 2006.

This post is written as part of AOL Money & Finance's Best & Worst of 2006. Vote for President Bush's fall from grace or see other nominees in this category.

U.S. President No. 43 has had a lousy 2006.

One way to judge President Bush's 2006 is to look at how much of what he wanted to achieve at the beginning of the year has actually been accomplished. By that measure, Bush did not fare all that well. Of the 14 agenda items he set out to achieve in his State of the Union address

• one got done,
• three were ongoing but two of these did not receive the increased funding Bush requested,
• on six, legislation was introduced but not passed, and
• four were unsuccessful.

Here are the details.

Although he did not complete his agenda items, the public judged Bush on Iraq and corruption in 2006. Contrary to his stated belief, the Republican party lost both houses of Congress in November. And a mere 31% of the American public approve of Bush's job performance.

Moreover, George W. Bush may not be the best choice in this category because he arguably did not begin 2006 with any "grace" from which to fall. Only 42% of the public approved of his job performance in January, which was eight percentage points below his January 2005 level. Will Bush return to a state of grace in 2007? That depends on how things turn out in Iraq.

Peter Cohan is President of Peter S. Cohan & Associates, a management consulting and venture capital firm, and a Professor of Management at Babson College.

This post is written as part of AOL Money & Finance's Best & Worst 2006. If you wouldn't mind seeing the Waltons lose all their money, be sure to cast your vote.

The patriarch of the Walton family, the wealthiest family in the world, is Sam Walton, founder of retail giants Wal-Mart (NYSE:WMT) and Sam's Club. Forbes called him the richest man in the world from 1985 to 1988, and Time magazine listed him as one of the 100 most influential people of the twentieth century. Papa Walton received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1992 from President George H.W. Bush. When Sam died in April of 1992, his eldest son, Rob, succeeded him as chairman of the board. Sam's widow and other children, John, Jim, and Alice, all own shares in the company, and members of the family held five spots in the top ten richest people in the United States until 2005. It has been suggested that if Sam were still alive today, his wealth would be nearly double that of Bill Gates, fellow nominee in this category.

John Walton, a Green Beret, saw action in the Vietnam War and was awarded the Silver Star. He sat on the Wal-Mart board until he died in a plane crash in 2005, at which time he was worth an estimated $18 billion, tied with his brother Jim as the eleventh richest person in the world, according to Forbes.

Helen Walton, Sam's widow, and her daughter Alice each have an estimated net worth of around $18 billion. Jim Walton's estimated net worth is around $15 billion. The daughters of Sam's partner and brother, Bud Walton, also hold shares in the company and are billionaires as well.