For you, JMCDSF... first of all voting patterns together with political perspectives forged in youth do, indeed, tend to be held throughout life. The old wives' tale about youngsters who aren't liberal not having hearts but oldsters who aren't conservative not having brains was always B.S. Those who grow up in healthy ways find their sensitivities naturally flavored by pragmatism as they gain more life experience, but they do NOT become conservatives in our current sense of the word. Rather, our current, virulent, unthinking form of conservatism is a psychological dysfunction born of overly-controlling, soul-stealing parenting.

Second... as to your fantasies regarding people being forced into homosexual marriages - although there is a small subculture in the gay community that enjoys dressing in uniforms and leather and playing at being authoritarian, there is no gay gestapo that's going to kidnap you at gun point, march you off to Massachusetts, and force you into a gay marriage with your best friend. That was, at one time, the style of straight people in some regions, but even they don't do it anymore (except in Alaska?).

Thanks to the Republicans in Congress beginning with the NEWT, NPR's budget has been repeatedly cut until now it only receives less than 1% of its budget from public funds. The rest comes from private contributions and from fees paid by affiliates nationwide for programming provided by NPR. Those fees from local stations come from people who pledge and give their own money directly to those stations. Membership in most local public radio stations seems to be getting stronger as it becomes more and more clear that they are a good source of actual facts and balanced discussion. Of course all that sounds pretty hard to take for "conservatives" because as we all know, with the current dysfunctional thinking patterns of most conservatives, truth does, indeed, seem to have a liberal bias. The truth can't POSSIBLY be true because it disagrees with their ideology (facts be damned). But hey! Elphie! I'll be happy to let you and your descendants withhold the portion of your taxes that goes to NPR if you'll let my and my descendants withhold the portion of our taxes that go to the Iraq war (which has been fought entirely on borrowed money).

I'm not sure why any of this is news since the official processes specified by state law have not yet played themselves out. For those of you interested in a bit more detail, there is a single, sealed envelope of 133 ballots counted by a single machine, number one of five from a precinct near the University of Minnesota. All five of these envelopes arrived at the Minneapolis election headquarters, were accepted and documented, numbers one, two, three, four and five of five on election night. Now the envelope labeled "number 1 of 5" has gone missing. They searched the warehouse thoroughly today, looking beneath the voting machines and boxes of supplies stored there but still did not discover that envelope. There is an existing machine count from election night for these ballots, but they have not been re-examined in the recount to see if there are votes for the senate race that the machine may have missed or misconstrued.

To add to the plot, the Democrats are asking that all rejected absentee ballots be examined to see if they were properly and legally rejected. This determination is initially made by local officials and rejecting them can be a bit of a judgment call with some officials seeming to look for the most miniscule reasons to reject while others, especially in smaller precincts going so far as to call absentee voters to come correct errors or sign the required application form. At least here in Minnesota it is legal for them to do so as long as everything is properly corrected by the time the polls close on election day.

So we have a bit of work yet to do. If the envelope containing 133 ballots can't be found, it's likely the machine total will be used since it is the only documented record of the count of those votes. It's also possible every absentee ballot application will be re-examined as well. Be patient! We'll get there! In the meantime, those who are screaming that there must be malfeasance somewhere are only revealing, as they always do, what they would do themselves (and probably have done), if given the opportunity to take advantage of a less-well-documented system than the one we use here in Minnesota. (THANK YOU JOAN GROWE!)

Andrew, perhaps you can address this issue for me, because I'm not really an economist: I've been wondering more and more as time has gone by, if this whole "collapse" wasn't precipitated by the fact that Bernanke and Paulson had been so incurious as to have no idea how interconnected the entire world was through the completely unregulated, largely invisible vehicle of "credit default swaps."

Wasn't it their decision to allow Lehman Brothers to collapse which, in turn, suddenly caused the entire world financial sector to realize their credit default swaps were worthless and they were massively exposed to the outrageous level of risk they had all taken on?

Hasn't the collapse of the credit default system, such as it was, been the cause of both the need for the $850 billion bailout and the cause of the contraction of the international economy?

In other words, didn't Bernanke and Paulson provoke this entire mess by making a very ignorant and irresponsible call regarding Lehman Brothers? Didn't they, then, run screaming to congress more than anything else, to try to cover up for the most massive mistake in management of our economy in recorded history and, in effect, seek to have the government pay off on all of those worthless, unregulated, credit default swaps?