What is it with the University of Chicago? First good ole Uncle Milton and then a whole bunch of coconuts. I mean it's not like some rich and famous family has put pots of dough into the place and wants a return.

Jonathan, nice disguised e-move to bring up the early 70s. Clearly, your implication is that we must reflect upon how we are heading on the same path; war that can’t end peacefully, an insane megalomaniac president with vain and traitorous, yet somehow sycophantic advisors bent on sucking all hope from the system, but so blinded by ideaology that they merely succeed in leading the country into one disaster after another – the forgotten one being the economic disaster that Ford (do you still have your ‘Whip Inflation Now’ button?) and Carter inherited.

Although one cannot mention Nixon, or his disastrous economic policies, without the liberal press pointing out that you "...are bashing a man who was merely misunderstood, a great man of history with great hopes forced to humiliate himself – and speaking of that, aren’t we all humiliated by what Clinton did with his cock?” (Your 70’s reference also implies that you feel like I do, that there is no number of times large enough for Nixon to be dug up and buried ever deeper. Perhaps that would be a fitting tradition for Martin Luther King Day ...in addition to several other holidays.

But I digress from your point that this headlong rush along a path toward the policies of a more degraded Reagan is beginning to play out in today’s US economy. It is possible that today’s bubble will last another year, but not longer. The next crash will be worse than the W.eenie crash of 2001, after which no one will ever again think about investing their security into the insecurity of the stock market.

Thus, the Bushtras are desperate to act now. So, Option one – which seems to be happening well – work to close off the possibility now (convince the dems to vote in a block and swing a large percentage of republicans by logic, or fear of the consequences of crossing the SS line) and/or Option 2 - drag the discussion out until the imminent and incipient W.eenie crash of 2006...just as you imply in your not so oblique reference to 1971.

"...imminent and incipient W.eenie crash of 2006..."

Why 2006? It's happening now. It's been happening for years, despite what the Enron accountants tell us about wonderful numbers. It might take until 2006 for the housing bubble to pop -- or it might not -- and when that happens it will make '71 look like a walk in the park.