We have seen the enemy and it is us.

Yes, the Federal Government had to step in to bail Wall Street out of the calamity that deregulation caused and that back slapping greed took advantage of. But they should have never had to step in. The last time we had this sort of disaster, and it was disaster lite compared to this, was with the S and L's, in the eighties, with, OMG, a Republican president, who also deregulated the markets, and at the head of it was a guy named Keating, who was located in Arizona, the home state of...Johnny "You can break my arms but not my spirit" McCain. OK, lets forget that. That was such a long time ago in the memory of the elephant iconed GOP. The funniest thing about this whole thing, is that if you think Europe (by the way, our allies, who we will need in the future to help run the Big Stoopit Wurl) didn't think so highly of us after the Iraq debacle ( and it is, happy surge or not) ) can really hate us now for spreading the cancer of Wall Street. We sold them a pile of shit. Thanks. Say, you Yanks are swell. The debt the Federal Government is taking on represents nothing. In the S&L crisis, it was property, land, essentially good stuff. This is crap. So, with 800 billion in reserves in January, the Fed, as of the last two weeks, is down to 2, and the story hasn't even started yet. But there are still people out there who can listen to the rantings of Moose Palin and her pimp Johnny "If I spend one more hour in the sun without SPF 900 I will explode" McCain and actually believe that this party, the party of unfettered cancerous capitalism, will somehow get them out of it, when they are precisely the ones that got us into the mess. Now, here is what happens. The Fed will have to borrow more against Social Security, so thats gone. They will have to borrow against or stop all sorts of entitlements like Medicare so thats gone. Public schools? Right. Roads. Dirt. Bridges? They'll all go to nowhere. The Military? Well, get ready for a draft. Healthcare? Take good care of yourself. You need hard regualtions in a capitalist system. Even as scurrilous a man as Andrew Jackson understood that. You need them because, today, when the internet got big, the Wall Street firms needed new products to keep them viable. So they invented crap. They sliced up the crap and put it in stuff that was OK, and turned those investments to crap. Greenspan allowed it to happen. And the true price tag? Worldwide? 5 trillion dollars. Watch what happens in the next three weeks. Buckle up, it's going to be a bumpy ride in the Big Stoopit Wurl. For the next 5 years, at least. And the crazy thing is that both sides and the getting dumber everyday news services keep asking "Who really understands the economy better?" Guess what, ITS CALLED THE DISMAL SCIENCE. Greenspan, the big brain, either didn't understand it or didn't care. So here we are. Get out your cardboard, your markers, and write your signs for the side of the highway ramps. Hope that a broker who pulled a 70 million dollar end of year bonus selling crap will drive buy and give you one of his. The GOP keeps telling people they'll cut their taxes. While they wage a war, and bail out Wall Street. But the thing they'll have to cut, if they get back in office, is whatever service you have counted on for all your adult life. And it will be a shit storm. To combat it, the Dems need to nominate Megan Fox as president. All the moose hunting yokels will say, "I'm voting for her. She's hotter than Palin." So long Empire. It was good to know ya!