Geithner, Summers, and Rubin have got to go. Glass-Steagall has got to be reinstated. It kept the banks in check for 66 years. The derivatives market has got to be tightly regulated.

Hell, if even Alan Greenspan has recognized that he made a fundamental error in thinking for 40 years, Clinton's failed economists, who followed Greenspan's lead in the 90s, which lead us to this disaster, need to rethink what they're doing.

But they're not doing that. Instead, they're making a big fuss about executive pay, which is just a distraction, to make it look like they're doing something tangible. What difference does it make if they take back millions in bonuses, if the companies are still trading tens, or hundreds, of billions in unregulated junk-backed derivatives of our money?

Everyone needs to watch Frontline's "The Warning," which is still on the PBS Web site. It shows how one woman, Brooksley Born, desperately tried to regulate the derivatives market back in 1993, when it was only a $27 trillion market. She was stopped cold by Greenspan, Summers, Geithner, Rubin, Clinton and Phil Gramm. Her regulatory power was taken away from her. It's a truly chilling documentary. Had they gone along with her, the financial meltdown would not have happened. By last year, it accounted for more than $500 trillion. That's $500 trillion of mostly shit.

Reich is right. What Obama's letting his economic team do is insanity. I can't believe that Obama and Congress are going to let the country go to shit because of campaign donations, but I don't know any other explanation for it. These are not stupid people. If Rubin can see it, if Greenspan can see it, hell, if I can see it, why can't they?

How in the world can the Beltway elite, along with the GOP fearmongers, keep managing to convince millions of Americans to go along with this misguided view, against their own interests? That's what I cannot understand.

Most of this country is made up of the middle-class, which is rapidly shrinking, and those who were upper-middle-class are losing ground. Many who were solidly middle-class are becoming lower-middle-class and even poor. They can't afford health care. I can't afford health care. Even if I didn't think it was morally right to expand it to everyone, even if I didn't think it was economically sound, I would selfishly want health care reform for myself.

Why do you think tens of millions of Americans who are barely surviving can't understand that health care reform will make life better for them? Why can't they see the elite bullshitters for who they are?

He refers to the BNP - the British National Party - a party that is fascist, racist, and a supporter of every kind of nightmare you can think of, as a party of the left. Every journalist, commentator, and person of sanity recognizes fascism, and the BNP, as a movement and a party of the far, far right. But Delingpole is a demagogue, and facts don't matter to him.

Nick Griffin, the BNP's leader, was on the BBC this week, and said, "I shared a platform with David Duke, who was once a leader of a Ku Klux Klan, always a totally non-violent one, incidentally." That's all he got out, because an African-American woman on the panel cut him off, and corrected his inaccurate statement.

So expect to see and hear more from Delingpole. I guess he's longing to join the ranks of vile Brits such as Derbyshire and Sullivan who jump at a chance to export their hatred and lies to America, because it's a bigger country than Britain, and it pays better. Is it unfair to lump Sullivan in with Derbyshire, because Sullivan is reasonable only on issues that actually affect him, such as gay rights and unfair drug laws? Nah, that makes him as much of an asshole as Derbyshire and Delingpole.

Katherine Harris, secretary of state and co-chair of Bush's Florida campaign, set out to keep thousands of voters off the eligible lists. How did she do this? By hiring a private firm, an unprecedented move, to purge the voting lists of possible convicted felons. However, state election officials ordered the firm to loosen the standards from an exact match on names, birthdates and genders to add to the purge list people who matched at least 80% of a last name. Thousands of people turned up on the lists who were the wrong gender, the wrong race and the wrong name. Florida election officials denied them the ability to vote anyway.

The private firm repeatedly told election officials that these lower standards would result in an exceptionally high rate of false matches, but officials insisted, and told the firm, "Forget about it."

Eventually, more than 173,000 people were flagged as felons. Eighty-eight percent of those flagged were black, in a state where blacks account for 14% of the population, but would vote 93% for Gore. Eventually at least 8,000 were deemed not to be felons. Many others, however, couldn't be contacted, because some of the matches on the list were 20 years old, and people had moved.

The private firm, incidentally, was staffed by high-level Republican operatives.

Bush "won" the Florida vote by 537 votes.