The political system of the United States is fundementally broken. We no longer have the ability to deal with complex issues.

Hell the current Healthcare bill in congress isn't even all that radical. Taken on its face, all it does is expend the existing system to cover more people. A few minor modifications are made to regulate private insurers. No one in power is proposing moving to a single payer system like Canada or a completely nationalized system like the UK.

And yet listening to the rhetoric coming from the right you would think the entire sytem is being scrapped.

The media's 'He said, they said' approach to coverage rewards the liars by giving even the most blantant of lies equal weight to the truth.

Add to that the most poorly educated citizenry in the developed world and we have a recipe for complete disaster.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. The probems plague efforts to save the environment, fix the structural problems of our economy etc etc.

In 200 years when our few surviving descendants write the histories of the late 20th and eary 21st centuries they will bemoan the complete failure of 'democracy' to deal with long term complex issues.

Such is the state of political discourse in this country. A relatively small agreement over a minor element of the bill causes Republicans to go nuts.

This just further reinforces the fact the Republicans have no interest in finding any type of common ground or offerring any of meaningful reform.

They firmly remain the party of NO.

I'm not kidding. We're barely six months into an Obama adminstration and we're already up to shutting down town hall meetings.

I've been saying for a long time now, the next major act of terrorism on US soil will come from one of these juiced up lunatics. And at the rate things are progressing it's going to occur sometime in the next couple of years.

I have seen this woman interviewed three times now. She's never come across as anything other than a nut job. That has yet to affect her popularity or the spread of her ideas. The simple fact that anybody other than Comedy Central is giving her a platform gives her ideas credibility with some segments of the public.

The news media continuing to treat this nonsense as a 'controversy' speaks volumes about how utterly messed up our political reporting has become.

What the DOW does day to day (or even month to month) has little to no effect on what happens in the lives of real people on 'Main Street'. So my 401k may be going up or down? Unless I want to pay huge penalties that money will not help pay my monthly bills. And if trends at my company are any indication a large number of employees are dropping their 401ks anyway because they can't afford the deductions from thier monthly bills.

The media's obsession with the stock market and its daily fluctuations is a major part of the problem.

And have been for years. I'll lay odds a good chunk of the voters have never seen most the shows nominated beyond a few minutes in a promotional DVD.

The only major awards show that is a bigger joke is the Grammies.

And much better staff work. Between not knowing who was sitting behind Sotomayor yesterday and his clear lack of understanding of even the basics of cases he's grilling Sotomayor about (I mean beyond the right wing bullet point analysis) he's looking dumber and dumber. He's had months to prepare for this moment and he looks like an amatuer (how long has he been a senator?).

All these stories about the economy 'hitting bottom' and the 'recession is over' leave out one very important element. How and when exactly will it come back? More importantly will the JOBS or the WAGES ever come back?

Sadly the answer to those questions remain bleak. Manufacturing in the US can only continue to go down. The service sector jobs that will replace those jobs will be far fewer and pay far less. The debt bubble that sustained the illusion of a vibrant middle class for the last 20 years has burst and will not be re-inflated in the short or mid term if ever.

Whatever 'recovery' (and we should stop using that term) happens will not touch most Americans who will continue to face shrinking wages (assuming they have jobs), rising healthcare costs and a host of other problems.

As I keep saying, I have yet to see anything that will reverse or significantly slow those trends appearing.

Sessions and Graham did not help Republican outreach efforts today.

How's that working out for everybody these days?

I'd take a few wise Latina women over almost all the white males in congress right now (Democrats and Republicans). I certainly can't think of how they could screw things up worse than the current lot of idiots that populate DC now.

Minnesota Sen. Al Franken: Finally in office, Franken is surely eager to show he can perform as well as any other senator

I know high school debaters could who could out perform many sitting Senators. Franken's opening statement yesterday already demonstrated he has a better command of the issues at stake than good chunk of his fellow Democrats (and let's not even talk about the Republicans).

The only people capable of separating themselves from their racial, gender, religious and finacial backgrounds are white upper-income Anglo-Saxon males (preferrably with Ivy League educations). Only they are capable of making decisions that are 'objective' and have nothing to do with their upbringing or lifestyles.