Democrats have been agonizing since Election Day 2004 over how to repackage their message to deceive values voters into believing they truly represent their interests. Never mind their promotion of same-sex marriage, abortion on demand and partial birth abortion. Never mind their ridiculing of Christian conservatives, their comparisons of Christian "fundamentalists" to Islamic fundamentalists or their institutional sneering at Boy Scouts.

Conservative Christians, I might add, didn't start this fight. They didn't issue the unconstitutional federal judicial edict severely restricting state regulation of abortions. They didn't try to change the thousands-year-old institution of traditional marriage. They aren't leading the assault on religious freedoms.

Day One: Put new rules in place to "break the link between lobbyists and legislation."

Day Two: Enact all the recommendations made by the commission that investigated the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Time remaining until 100 hours: Raise the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour, maybe in one step. Cut the interest rate on student loans in half. Allow the government to negotiate directly with the pharmaceutical companies for lower drug prices for Medicare patients.

I personally don't think that just getting out of Iraq overnight is good for our security.

And as far as the economy goes........hard to argue with the wall street and unemployment #'s.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average was bouncing around 11,000 in the year 2000. Last week's close was 12,002. So, based on those numbers, after swiping trillions of taxpayer dollars -- borrowed from you and your children--and tossing it into the gaping bottomless maw of Wall Street's elite like so much papery green chum, the return on the DJIA during CEO Mastermind George Bush's reign weighs in at a whopping ~ 1.5% a year or so. In between it took a steep dip resembling a certain mountain pass in Tora Bora and has regained just barely enough to rival the interest my credit union pays on a checking account. Goodness gracious, where will we spend it all?

And for you tech investors, the NASDAQ Composite Index hit a high of about 5000 in March of 2000. It ended the week at 2342. Good grief, you'd have done considerably better if you had sealed the cash in a tin can and buried it in your yard for the last six years. Were the NASDAQ COMP a conscious entity in need of immediate medical attention, it might just give up at this point and opt for a mercy killing, lest the poor thing suffer another agonizing botched operation under the inept knife wielding hands of Doc Bush and Nurse Cheney.

But since the GOP majority in Congress has engaged in an unprecedented spending spree, conservatives know that Democrats cannot be any worse and that divided government may lead to less spending," Viguerie said.

Tax revenues were up nearly 13 percent, about $176 billion more than last year's total, according to the Treasury Department. The Congressional Budget Office, using slightly different measures, reported tax receipts in the first eight months of the year were up 12.8 percent, the second-fastest growth in nearly 25 years. Only last year's 15.5 percent growth was greater.

Economic growth slowed to a crawl in the third quarter, advancing at a pace of just 1.6 percent, the worst in more than three years.
The latest snapshot of the economy, released by the Commerce Department on Friday, showed that the slumping housing market figured prominently in the economy's dramatic loss of momentum. Investment in homebuilding was cut by the biggest amount since early 1991.