What are the choices? 70% majorities? Minority parties to the left? Give in to the Republicans who can change the course of public policy with 50.5% majorities? Selectively remove DINOs, aiming mostly to move them to the left but admitting that some will fall to the right? I don't know.

It seems that 70% majorities are a pipe dream. Giving in the Republicans is a disaster. That leaves minority parties and selectively removing DINOs. Minority parties have never made much headway in American politics.

Time to select the DINOs who will fall.

But, now I see that we have our own bigots here as well.

Fred, when I see a terrorist action in the US, why should I be more likely to expect it to have come from a Muslim than, say, from a member of the anti-immigration movement? Is that because the Bush administration spent 8 years defining radical Muslims as terrorists and their identical counterparts in the anti-immigration movement as patriots? Why do we now have the phrase "environmental terrorist" but not the phrase "second amendment terrorist"?

Bottom line: all religions... teach... hate and... murder.

bottom up

bottom up

bottom up

The problem is that there is no neutral market. Attacking the naivety of those who defend merit value is a red herring.

Markets are social constructions created by the rules established by laws and regulations. The current set of rules and regulations establish the way that the markets work at present. If, as some believe, there might be defects in these rules, then there is nothing special about changing the rules.

Are there defects? The long term (Plato to 19th century and most of the world today) view of government has been that government exists to provide for the well being of the population at large. If something in the way we create markets defeats this, we are free to change the markets.

It is reasonable to argue that allowing money changers (bankers) to skim huge sums of money off banking transactions in relatively non-transparent transactions (computerized banking, swaps, etc.) is not beneficial to the public at large. In that case, perhaps the markets should be changed. One way to do that is to limit how much people can skim off the markets (set salary caps). Perfectly reasonable. Has nothing to do with market value or merit value. It is the rules of the game.

Let's not frame the problem wrongly.