Is that the definition of any word, "socialism" etc. is whatever we say it is TODAY. It very well might be different tomorrow or even different this afternoon than it was this morning.

What I'd like to see is for all the personalities (there are no journalists left) on these 24-hour news channels to take the NCLB graduation exams here in Minnesota. Let's include Rubaugh as well. Only those who pass the exams could continue on the air.

Likely we'd have a whole new batch of talking heads thereafter.

But then of course if we made all the senators and congressmen and, just for laughs, our former president take the same exams that they thought were SO important, it would likely prove... embarrassing?

Especially when it came to Republicans and anything to do with mathematics or history.

Because it is anathema to the personality dysfunctions of the current Republican leaders, their 23% of faithful followers and their leader, and chief Saint (or should that be demon?) Rubaugh. Since the days of Saint Ronnie, the Republicans have been about government by, of and for the rich. They simply can't bring themselves to consider helping the rest of the populace, especially if it gets in the way of the rich eternally getting richer.

The interesting thing will be whether, when the Republicans start trotting out cases where some part of the stimulus package has been spent in questionable ways (which, considering it will be spent by humans, are inevitable), it will cause the Democrats to finally go on the offensive and begin exploring all the hundreds of uninvestigated cases of spending malfeasance during Buscho. I can only hope, because if they do, the Republicans will be back pedaling for the next 50 years.

I'm still employed and don't have a mortgage to worry about either, but my pension plan has taken a huge hit with the stock market contraction and my feasible retirement date is receding into the distance these days.

But I'm convinced that the entire increase in the value of stocks, real estate and commodities of every type over the past many years has had nothing to do with actual supply and demand of those items, but rather with a large amount of investible cash chasing a relatively finite amount of investment vehicles and thus bidding up, through speculation, the values of those investment vehicles until they were completely disconnected from the actual value of the REAL WORLD items they represented.

This was all structured in ways far too much like a Madoff scheme and could continue only as long as investments were increasing enough to cover payouts on non-existent value. Now that the economy has peaked and is contracting, every kind of investment is going down in a percentage which is likely to be the same multiple of economic contraction as it was of economic expansion (which, considering how much of the increase in GDP was based on the speculative inflation in the value of investments means that multiple is a very high number) The value of investments will continue to go down until the value of investments approximates the things they represent in the real world (and, sadly, is likely to drop below real value before it begins to recover.

This is the fault of a deregulated, and largely unregulated system which allowed such rampant and heavily leveraged speculative investment and encouraged investment houses, stock analysts, and the press to lie through their teeth regarding what was happening (with no threat of penalty and no controls allowed), mostly in the very human desire to keep the value of their own investments propped up.

Bottom line - when it comes to Wall Street the folks there have made this bed and they'll be the ones to lie in it. But the rest of us will also be lying in bed with these economic inverts. (Don't be surprised if they try to steal all the blankets and pillows and push us off to sleep on the floor.) There's no way the Federal government can beg, borrow, or steal enough money to make up for the losses investors will suffer as the result of Wall Street's greedy, selfish, self-serving policies over the past many years.

The market is going down and will continue to do so for quite some time, but believe it or not, the market is not an accurate gauge of the health of the economy. In fact as it's lately been functioning the aggregate value of the stock market as represented by Wall Street and the well being of the economy where real people live have precious little to do with each other.

In fact if business and manufacturing concerns begin to ignore the dictates and demands of Wall Street for maximum quarterly profit while ignoring the needs of their workers and the environment, it's likely the real world will recover much more rapidly.

Or will the deflation be swallowed up by the inflation...? When will reach new levels of de-inflation or in-deflation?

Or maybe we should all finally take the red pill and see how deep the rabbit hole of an alternate reality in which these Republicans are living goes and... what color the sky is in their world?

Maybe we can even discover how to break them loose and bring them back into the real world. But then again, maybe they couldn't survive. "We have a rule. We never free a mind once it's reached a certain age. It's dangerous. The mind has trouble letting go."

I suspect the tidy little world of unreality our Republican friends have tried to suck the rest of down into for the past many years, a world which would have allowed us to become nothing but the enslaved Duracell batteries doing all the work which provided for massive increases in their wealth and material comfort still seems too necessary for them to risk even a glimpse of what's real.