...of a guy named Ron Paul who, during his primary, put together a coalition just as diverse, widespread, youthful, professional, and enthusiastic as Obama's?

You are correct in your contention that the tensions within the GOP post-Nixon coalition have come to a head, and that the libertarians and the theocons can no longer live together under one roof. However, your assumption that both factions are equally electorally bankrupt is way off base.

Demographics may trending against the theocons, but libertarianism is alive and well, and thriving in today's electorate. Ron Paul is the future of the Republican party. The sooner the GOP realizes this, and jettison's their theocon wing, the sooner they will rebound.

...for speaking up. Lots of broad generalizations being made here regarding what women like sexually. No sources being cited either - not that any of this subjective stuff can actually be objectively proven one way or the other, anyway.

For my money, Allie had the best explanation on this thread for the demise of Playgirl. It was also the simplest. And one of the only ones that didn't buy into the whole "women aren't stimulated by the visual, women really want a story" canard.

...how this invalidates the thesis that repealing Glass Steagall was a good thing. Is it not true that the investment banks that had a commercial banking division were, in fact, more stable than the ones that didn't?

The critique that "bigger is not better" doesn't seem to me to be relevant to the Glass-Steagall issue. Glass-Steagall addressed the nature of financial institutions, not their size.

The Chairman of the Fed is not a cabinet position. He is appointed to a specified term that, I believe, overlaps Presidential terms. He cannot be replaced at the President's whim.

Thanks for the history lesson regarding all of this.

I am still not entirely convinced that simply allowing a company to enter more than one financial service market - so long as there are no conflicts of interest - necessarily leads to unsustainable growth and instability. The left-of-center conventional wisdom on this financial crisis seems to be that it was a passive failure of government - government failed to act, in the form of regulatory enforcement, to stop it. I am not unconvinced that it wasn't actually an active failure of government - that goverment actively created this situation through reckless deficit spending and an interest rate held artificially low. Is it not possible that the unprecedented growth of these companies, and the recklessness and disorganization that can accompany such diseconomies of scale, had more to do with a simple overabundance of capital in the economy, and less to do with the rules regarding what could and couldn't be done with it?

"If this 'had more to do with a simple overabundance of capital in the economy and less to do with the rules...' why have we not experienced such carnage prior to the repeal of the law in similar circumstances when interest rate were at floor level and capital was abundant?"

Have we had a situation like this before, involving such utter financial recklessness on the part of the federal government, coupled with a Federal Reserve bound and determined to avoid an imminent recession at all costs?

I am not asking this question rhetorically. I am not an economist, and don't know the answer. However, it doesn't seem to me that we have. The most profligate deficit spending we have had in recent memory, other than the Bush administration, were the Reagan years. Still, if I recall correctly, (a) the rate of deficit increase was not nearly as rapid under Reagan as it was under Bush, and (b) the Federal Reserve was much more interested in inflation back then, and wasn't cutting rates with such abandon. And still, the 80's did result in a financial crisis of their own in the savings and loan industry.

As I said, I am not an economist, and am aware that there could be something here that I am missing. But it seems to me that if the money supply is out of whack, and there is a glut of liquid capital in the market, you are going to see reckless and irresponsible investment of it regardless of what rules and regulations you enact, because such a glut of liquid capital will distort the market signals that the financial industry is relying on to make its choices.

...,apparently, Monetarists live or die by what Paul Krugman says about them. Thus, they are despairing today because Krugman gave them the thumbs down.

Below is a link to Roderick Long's explanation - from the Austrian perspective - of how we got into this mess, and what can be done about it. I doubt he's quaking today over Krugman's pronouncement.

http://www.theartofthepossible.net/2008/10/09/regulation-the-cause-not-the-cure-of-the-financial-crisis/