Homophobia implies an irrational fear. Given the vast hidden cost of AIDs -- even its significant role in the current economic mess, the fear is not irrational.

I know I shouldn't respond to the deranged missives of a wingnut, but really, this fleck of stupidity comes from so far outside the bounds of reality it's quite noteworthy. Physicists should study it for evidence it originated in a parallel universe where black is white, freedom is slavery and Sarah Palin has more IQ points than Neiman Marcus hangers in her closet.

I'm thinking AIDS in total hasn't cost the taxpayers as much as the implosion of just one large Wall Street investment bank thanks to decades of rightwing propaganda, deregulatory idiocy and corporate mismanagement. And the thing about AIDS is that someday we're gonna find a vaccine, or maybe even a cure. Stupid rich criminals on the other hand are a plague we seem incapable of stopping, although the liberal application of ropes and lampposts might one day soon make it more manageable.

My point is that Hillary knew how to act convincingly working class

I got your point, AK. And while I think you're a smart and reasonable person, I think you're totally off-base here. Hillary's working class act was about as convincing as Bruce Jenner's plastic surgery. The same trogs who came out to vote for her in the primary had been telling pollsters they hated her just a year before.

What changed? Certainly not her shtick, which was just as fraudulent in 2008 as it had been the previous 20 years. What changed is that she was running against a black guy. Ooooh, black guy. Skeery!

I'm wondering what's going to happen to all the cracker cretins when Obama doesn't turn out to be the radical Mooslem socialist they were all claiming he was. Will they admit to being wrong, or accuse him of some new made-up idiocy?

Maybe they'll claim he's a Martian sent here to steal our water. That ought to be good for a couple of quarts of spittle over at freerepublic.com.

And the working class don't really believe GWB is one of them either.

Oh of course they do. He adopted a hick accent and they ate it up like it was gravy. This Ivy League phony held on to a 60%+ approval rating for an eternity, long after it was obvious he was a world-class fuck up and colossal douchebag.

Didn't hurt that he had the corporate media on his side, peddling rightwing B.S. 24/7. Just look at how a vast swath of the working class fawned over that transparent fraud Palin. I mean, she's running as Jesus with a vagina and she's got a knocked-up, unwed teenage daughter at home. Those are some upstanding family values ya got there, Sarah! I can see your crotchfruit didn't fall far from your self-obsessed tree. And how homespun it was to buy expensive silk boxers for the First Dude using campaign cash. There's a family that has its priorities straight!

And I know you'd like to believe it's not as simple as racism, but unfortunately it is just that simple. That's the collation Nixon put together 40 years ago, and it's one that's only now coming unwound, as the demographic sand shifts beneath the Republicans' feet. Unfortunately for them, it looks like they don't have much of a Plan B. For which I am playing the world's tiniest violin.

I think Edwards talked a progressive talk, but still managed to come off as a pouffy haired lightweight.

Which, in fact, he turned out to be.

Hillary's progressive talk was just that - talk. It had about as much force behind it as that deadly Bosnian sniper fire she once faced.

I think, had McCain picked someone remotely competent as his running mate, and gone up against Hillary and her merry band of Democratic Party wreckers (like Penn), he'd have stood a good chance against her. When given a choice between the fake Republican and the real Republican voters always choose the real deal.

It was Nixon who got the Klan and the religious fanatics to board the Republican bus to nowhere 40 years ago. The upstanding cloth coat Republicans, with their gay friends (and kids) and their staid, respectable churches made a deal with the devil, and let the stinking, drooling, cretinous third of the American population onboard the bus in return for broad electoral dominance and low taxes on their - by this point - almost entirely unearned riches. Inheritance and position were freely handed down from one generation of out-of-touch kleptocrats to another, until finally even obvious Ponzi schemes like the dot com and real estate bubbles were embraced, defended and promoted at the highest levels. Remember Shrub crowing about his beloved "Ownership Society" just four or five years ago?

Well, the taxpayers got "owned" alright, as they're now being called upon to fund trillions in bailouts for idiot-run financial services titans, who plowed full-steam ahead into massively obvious fiscal icebergs. It's kind of hard to argue against socialism with a straight face while you're asking Wal*Mart greeters to part with $15,000 in order to keep outfits like AIG from imploding. If those idiots can get a handout, what about people who do legitimate, productive work for a living? Where's THEIR handout?

So now what's left of the Northeastern cloth coat Republicans have abandoned the 'Puggies for the Democrats - there isn't a single Republican rep left from the Northeast. Not one. Their Republican Senators will be the next to go extinct. What was once the Republican's core is gone. They're left with the cretins and maniacs Nixon let on the bus, stranded in the middle of nowhere and surrounded by an electorate which isn't just disinclined to agree with their imbecilic, racist core, but which actively detests it.

It should be fun to watch the remaining Republicans devour one another. They should rename themselves the Donner Party.