I don't think there is any dispute, either in the post or the comments, that there is reason to be concerned about the virulent right-wing extremism that has been so much on display lately and the fact that there is so much palpable rage among the Republican base. Whether or not it is worse today than during the Clinton years can be debated but ultimately can not really be determined, since evaluating the relative strength of extremist movements over time is a difficult business.

As the material conditions are so much worse now than they were during the Clinton era, I think we can safely say that the rage factor has increased. Poorly educated and ill-informed people are angry about their economic situation and the loss of control over their lives, and since they cannot understand how all this came to be and are generally ideologically unable to attribute the problems to, for instance, laissez-faire capitalism or the costs of perpetual war, they are susceptible to the absurd ravings of these sick demagogues.

Brawndo. It's got electrolytes.

This is the function of ideology, as Althusser has described it:

In ideology men do indeed express, not the relation between them and their conditions of existence, but the way they live the relation between them and their conditions of existence: this presupposes both a real and an ‘imaginary’, ‘lived’ relation . . . the real relation is inevitably invested in the imaginary relation, a relation that expresses a will, . . . a hope or a nostalgia, rather than describing a reality.

And if ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence, then Fox news is the arbiter of this imaginary relationship. Beck is now at the forefront of the effort to provide targets for all of this misdirected rage.

Frankly, I could easily kick your ass on general principles.

Back to my meaning-of-ideology fun: Ideology can be a delimiter, in defining ways of seeing the world and narrowing the scope of discourse about it. In other words, it can save people from thinking too hard about things. So, by virtue of the fact that you are a thinking, questioning individual, you have a really unfair advantage over youngservative.

Credit Default Swaps Collateralized Debt Obligations Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility Term Auction Facility Term Securities Lending Facility Primary Dealer Credit Facility Commercial Paper Funding Facility Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility Money Market Investor Funding Facility

Whoa! I like it when you talk dirty.

You dirty unserious hippy.

We all bow to your superior knowledge and intellect.

Now, please, I implore you, start your own blog. I feel certain that when you do, we will all desert Glenn and knock each other over in our panting efforts to get to you and imbibe your eternal truths. If only we had known all this time that there was someone of your unique and dazzling genius out there. I am all a'quiver.

Now go, and set the Thames on fire! You owe it to the world.

Thanks for the story about the SEC and Bank of America. When, as Robert Reich says, Obama's plans to regulate the financial sector are "milquetoast," we need to be able to count on someone to watch their rapacious asses.

Yet another FAIL for Obama.

I am bolding all my text so people can actually read it. Pfft.

You know what--an actor that worked with him on a film said that he is so right wing that you think he is joking when he talks politics. But he's not. So weird.

As The Dude said. Aggression by the 1% who have more wealth than the rest of us combined; aggression because apparently no matter how much they take, it is never enough.

It is completely unsustainable. Something has got to give. And the more people like Mr. Sirota write about it, the sooner it will give.

I curse the day my French-speaking grandparents emigrated from Canada to work in Massachusetts factories. I could have been fluent in two languages and I would never have had to worry about health care. Dammit dammit dammit. Curse you, Grandpa Metevier!!!

Btw, I am curious about the coverage in Canada of the wingnut lunacy here, if they in fact cover it at all. If I were Canadian, I would probably be agitating for my government to build a wall to keep Amurcans out, like we are doing here with Mexicans.

This has been obtained from a secret rightwing security watchdog organization:

A new danger from illegal aliens. This intel comes from our insiders in colleges and universities across the U.S. There is a huge new threat of illegal aliens entering the United States from abroad, and we seem powerless to stop them. These aliens, we gather, are swarthy people with snaggled, prominent teeth, and abundant wavy hair. They are said to be a warrior race and may have originated some distance away. They have their own unique weapons, and they are very particular about their diet: their food must be extremely fresh.

Strangely, our informants have overheard students talking about these foreigners in the engineering or science departments of our nations colleges and universities. What is very worrying to us is that our young people seem to be learning the bizarre and incomprehensible language of these dangerous illegal aliens. It is bad enough that we have Spanish spoken in our borders states--that is un-American and unacceptable. But now we find that our leaders of tomorrow--our college students--are willingly, even happily, adopting the language of a fearsome gang of swarthy illegals. This may be one of the greatest threats ever. We must at the very least get the English-only laws passed before it is too late and we are all eating live worms for breakfast.

Does this make you rethink your strategy, coram nobis?