And just some advice to the next President, you're wasting your time time kissing evangelical asses. It just further empowers them, and they will NEVER support you.

I get what you're saying, but I wish people would stop confusing evangelicals with fundamentalists. There are liberal evangelicals, and they can be won over, but bestowing honors and groveling before an obvious unrepentant bigot like Rick Warren is not the path into their good graces.

At best it only strengthens the wing-nut, far right, fundamentalist flank of the evangelical movement, while eroding support from the Democratic base - support Obama's gonna need if he wants to get anything done during the next 4 years, let alone win re-election.

Rick Warren and his ilk will never, in a million years, get behind a remotely progressive agenda. Not gonna happen. You can't fill a well-funded megachurch with progressive evangelicals - they aren't that easily (mis)led - and you certainly aren't going to wield the kind of political power Warren has (and seeks to expand).

Well, they've got the vote pretty much nailed down at the local mental hospital and the at the local Klan rally. Apart from their spittle-flecked base however, it's hard to see how the Republicans hope to win re-election outside those parts of America where the residents can count to 12 on their fingers, and to 24 on their fingers and toes.

Cue the banjo music.

Between Larry Craig, Mark Foley and Ted Haggard, I'd say the Republicans are a lot more anal than the Democrats.

Or, at least, a lot more into anal . . .

Please lick the bowl clean on your way down!

Make sure to get under the rim, too!

It baffles comprehension that so much could go so wrong so fast.

Anybody who witnessed how the Right fucked up the last time they were put in charge - during the 1920's - certainly isn't surprised to see so much of what they managed collapse so quickly.

And don't even ask the Germans how their Reichwing fools managed the country. Hey, it's what happens when you try to propagandize your way around reality - reality has a funny way of turning around and biting your ass off. And reality has a left wing bias.

The only surprising thing about this latest crash is that the wingnuts managed to keep such an obvious scam going for as long as they did - from roughly 1968 thru 2008, a span of about 40 years. But I guess it helps when half the country gets its news from media conglomerates owned by the same batch of crooked billionaires. If you can shovel out a 24/7 stream of free market propaganda, you can get enough greedy suckers to buy into it even as their jobs and bank accounts slowly boil off. It takes a total collapse before the frogs finally wise up and start to jump out of the pot.

And of course, there was so much infrastructure built up by the left, under fairly Socialist administrations run by Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy. That couldn't all be brought down overnight, even by the Right's idiotic mismanagement. But no system is foolproof when control is handed over to a group of sufficiently corrupt fools, and now it's gonna take another Roosevelt to save capitalism from the capitalists.

I hope Obama's up to it. They'd better hope so, too - otherwise, this is likely to end with a lot of rightwingers heads atop a lot of pikes.

That would have been quite a feat there, Randoid, considering the Bush Fraudministration pretty much depopulated the regulatory machine, as a quick Google search will demonstrate. See http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/nation/11/01/1101fbi.html for just one example. To quote:

Nationwide, only about 180 agents are investigating mortgage fraud in what has been called the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression. About 100 additional agents are investigating corporate fraud, including the subprime loan debacle.

Tony Adamski, the FBI's former head of financial crime investigations, said Thursday that he had more than 1,000 agents dedicated to financial crimes during the savings and loan scandal of the 1980s and early 1990s.

When told how many agents the bureau has working the problem, Adamski, now retired, laughed.

"They must be absolutely overwhelmed," he said. "It's clear to me that they don't have enough resources for the magnitude of the problem."

But I don't expect the free market trolls to acknowledge reality. You wouldn't be free market trolls if you were remotely in touch with reality.

Contrary to the total collapse of the r.e. market, et al if you bought your house 4 years ago or before, you could sell it now for a profit.

Good luck with that. Home sales continue to plunge, as do prices. A house put on the market today isn't likely to sell for a month or two even in "good" areas - by which time its price will have likely dropped another 5% or so. Assuming you don't own a home in a market flooded with inventory, like Phoenix, in which case you're pretty much screwed.

There's no sign the market is going to improve anytime soon either, with unemployment skyrocketing and credit still hard to come by. That means by the end of 2009 homes are likely to be going for 2004 prices across much of the country - if that much - leaving millions way underwater and further feeding the cycle of declining home prices.

But please, please don't let any troublesome facts confuse you!