So let me ask just one question: what happened to the Bush regulation plan in 2003? Did the Democratic Congress sink it? Can't be: the Republicans owned the Congress for a dozen years until about 15 months ago. So where were all these newly responsible Republicans (and Democrats) in 2003, let alone in 2000 or even 1997? I've been reading dire predictions in the Economist on just this subject for something like a decade; so where were my noble Republicans? Or were they too busy running up the deficit and assuring us that we could have guns, butter and circuses?

ital,

The Democrats were totally against it and attracted enough crooked Republicans to sink it.

Best Congress money can buy.

Sorry to say, little the Republicans did with their long term majority even remotely lived up to their "fiscally res ponsible" rhetoric. And I have no reason whatsoever to think that McCain, now busily painting himself as a born again non-Washingtonian, will do any better. I'll probably suck it up and vote for him—and then pray that he survives the term, as the kindest thing one could say about Palin is that she's untried.

I'm still looking for a party that might actually drastically shrink farm subsidies, raise incentives for a substantial savings rate, make wholesale cuts in the Federal bureaucracy, stop paying consultants and private contractors to do the work that the remaining bureaucrats (and military) were supposed to be doing, and finally, to find ways to rein in financial institutions so that "too big to fail" doesn't arise or, if it does, so that the rest of the financial sector is forced to pay the costs—now *that* would be an incentive for an industry to police itself.

Tomorrow I'll be wearing either my Javits or Rockefeller buttons. Any suggestion on which?

ital,

So true. We have a choice between bad and worse. There is a glimmer with bad due to his VP choice. Slim pickens.

It is what it is.

Choose.