Thank you, Glenn, for pointing out what is all too obvious to anybody who attempts to be even-handed about these things. Of course, by definition, that excludes most of our political establishment.

I admit that I have something of a morbid fascination with characters like Hagee, partly because of my own upbringing in a small town in the South that contained more that its fair share of such "religious" charlatans.

What I have found alarming in terms of American culture, however, is the change I've seen just in my lifetime as to how these people are treated. I'm not yet 40, but I can remember a time when even people who went to these types of churches (which were typically small) were embarrassed by their leaders' excesses, and everybody else just laughed at them.

Nowadays, of course, evangelical megachurches are all the rage. These institutions have basically dressed up theology that's only marginally less extreme than Hagee's (the inevitable wisdom of American militarism, the inherent evil of gays and abortion, etc.) and paraded it around as acceptable and even reasonable. There have been times in the last 10-15 years when I've wondered if I were living in a time and place similar to the Weimar Republic - as the public becomes steadily more delusional and under the sway of people who spout unbelievably deranged things.

I don't know how to crack the code on this - to get large numbers of Americans to stop believing what is essentially a type of Christian fascism - but calling the press to account for its lack of balance is a great start.

I chuckle at how many Americans will swallow anything if it's presented by someone who makes an effort at sounding credible and presents it in I-know-what's-good-for-you therapeutic tones. Case in point: Suze Orman. To be fair, most of her advice is standard boilerplate financial planning stuff that you can find anywhere - even in your Sunday paper - without buying her books.

However, I remember a real doozy she came out with a couple of years ago. On a PBS show, she actually told her audience not to buy bond mutual funds, but to do their own research and buy bonds individually!

I almost fell out of my chair at such a ludicrous proposition. Did she really just tell mom and pop to construct their own bond portfolios? She sure did.

I work in financial services, and I can tell you that this is a task that only a fixed-income analyst or portfolio manager with a significant amount of training (and aptitude) can perform with any degree of competence. Besides, most average people investing in a 401(k) wouldn't even have that option available to them. In other words, this was at best useless, and at worst just downright bad advice.

Don't believe everything you hear - even on PBS.

The increase in bankruptcies and foreclosures, with concomitant decrease in demand for consumer goods like iPods, might suggest nothing more than that people were spending money they didn't have on things they couldn't afford.

This has been the way of the American economy for a long time now, but logic would dictate that it can't go on forever.

Even those of us on the other side of the fence should mourn the demise of Ron Paul's candidacy. The fact that so few Republicans would actually vote for him just proves what liberals have thought all along: the current generation of Republicans are anything but conservative. They're proto-fascist, right-wing authoritarians. They don't believe in individual liberty (except for themselves, of course), and they're contemptuous of the rights of the people as expressed in the U.S. Constitution.

For that matter, I'm not terribly convinced that either Obama or Hillary believes in those ideals, as evidenced by their lukewarm opposition to warrantless wiretapping. I guess at this point in American politics, we have to choose between some rights or none at all.

By pandering to the worst instincts in the American character - the prurient and puritanical obsession with everything sexual - politicians are reaping what they've sown.

How many times have we had to listen to a politician give another droning speech about the importance of "values," or go on and on about their "faith"? How often has it been obvious that whatever "values" they're talking about merely represent a form of code-speak, meant to leave out whole classes of people and divide the electorate?

Most of the time, this type of political discourse comes at the expense of a discussion about things that politicians can actually do something about, like priorities for public spending, or environmental laws, or international relations.

In short, it's no politician's business what my "values" are. Maybe if they continue to get burned, they'll think twice before prosecuting people for victimless crimes, scapegoating sexual minorities, or any of the other despicable tactics they indulge in. Until then, we should enjoy the show.

Glenn, can you (or any readers) comment on an editorial by Silvestre Reyes on the PAA that appeared today in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune?

http://www.startribune.com/opinion/commentary/16866491.html

He wrote this article in response to an idiotic rant by a local Republican Congresswoman about the House's "failure" to renew the PAA.

Here's what seems disturbing: Reyes, quoting the administration, states the government is now getting "full cooperation" from the telecoms and that the "authorities" of the PAA (I don't know what that means) remain "in full effect".

Is he simply referring to the provision (which he references later) that allows surveillance begun under the PAA to continue for a year? Since that reference comes in a succeeding paragraph, it's not entirely clear to me.

I found the piece as a whole to be somewhat mealy-mouthed and less than inspiring, as Reyes seems more concerned with how mean the Republicans are and trying to prove that "everyone is cooperating" than with ensuring the protection of Fourth Amendment guarantees.