After a quarter century of Republican domination, the country is going down the dumper. This is not the time to experiment with the question of whether the country will elect a white woman who a third of the electorate hates or a black man who will lose all the South and border states.

The press has made this a two person race. Maybe the voters or even Democratic pros have time to turn it around. John Edwards would do nicely. My personal choice was Joe Biden, but he's gone.

Since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the Republican Party has done an incredible job of screwing 90 to 95 per cent of the American people for the benefit of less than one per cent. The current unraveling of the economy is simply the predictable consequence of that process. Moreover, by running up the national debt during the Reagan and both Bush terms, and by gutting the tax system, they have greatly reduced the government's ability to fight our difficulties.

This is the third time in American history where an extended period of Republican dominance has led to an extreme concentration of wealth in a few hands, and the first two were followed by depressions (1893, 1929). We'll see how bad the present situation gets.

It is time to put the Republican Party out of business. Then we can take a serious look at the people who have robbed us blind for the last quarter century and even the score. (And, of course, I don't expect any of this to happen because Democrats are too incompetent to run on a platform of economic justice, and most voters are too dumb to understand what has been done to them.)

First, an "Amen" to Jacksonian's posting.

People need to remember that this is a country that elected Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush president twice each. That is an incredible indictment of both the intelligence and taste of the American people. God only knows what kind of crap the yahoos will buy this year.

In Arkansas, voter registration for the upcoming primaries closed last week. Our local paper did an article on new voters coming out for the first time. The lead character was a woman who had never voted (I think she was in her 40s). She was planning to vote for Huckabee in the Republican primary, but she was really interested in being registered so she could vote against either Clinton or Obama in the election. I will bet there are millions of those voters who we will see for the first time in 2008.

In spite of all issues favoring Democrats this year, do not underestimate their capacity to screw it up.

If anyone were serious about running the country on clear biblical mandates, there would be no need to amend the constitution.

Under the current system, we would tax the rich and take care of poor people, and we would stop harassing immigrants. Those are clear mandates from both the Old and New Testaments.

The sex stuff, except for adultery (and that only applied when the woman was married to another man), was never a big deal. The equation of sin with sex is just an appeal to the simple minded.

We'd probably have to mandate of worship only of Yahweh, but if we did the stuff that actually mattered, I'd accept that.

The fact that all Republican candidates are willing to associate themselves with the legacy of Ronald Reagan is a good summary of this country's problems. People think that Reagan was a great president, and that somehow he saved America from something. The simple truth is that Reagan's presidency was a disaster for the great majority of Americans, the end of the American dream for most Americans, and the beginning of the end of the American Century.

I will mention just three specifics: 1)There were no Reagan tax cuts. The Reagan years saw a transfer of the tax burden from wealthier Americans to everybody else (by cutting income taxes and raising Social Security taxes). 2)Of all new income generated during the Reagan years, about 73% (NY Times estimate) went to the richest one percent of Americans. 3)The national debt was less than one trillion dollars when Reagan entered the office; it was over six trillion when Clinton entered. (GWB has gotten it up to over nine, I think.)

These so-called conservatives have destroyed the America I grew up in.

As a life long (except for getting educated) Southern, and as someone who has had lots of experience with Southern Baptists (they have been trying to save me since I was about eight), I'd like to cut Mike Huckabee a little slack on the religious pronouncements. Yeah, he has said a bunch of things that sound somewhere between weird and outrageous to anyone with a post enlightenment mind, but he sort of has to. That's the way those people talk. He has to deny evolution and say that men are supposed to be the head of their families or he'd be complete phony (and, of course, that doesn't bother most of his competition).

The serious question is how his beliefs would affect the way he governed, and there the record is a mixed bag: Nasty opposition to abortion in circumstances that would shock the conscience for most of us and primitive, uninformed views of HIV and homosexuality; but seemingly heartfelt charitable responses to Catrina refugees (Arkansas did better than any other state and got less credit for it) and to the children of illegal immigrants.

There are better reasons for being scared of this guy; but I'm trying to keep quiet until they nominate him.