The BobboSphere: Don't believe everything you think.

Trust me folks, you hav­en't seen the last of Sarah Palin. The "Disasta from Alaska" is about to become the new Queen of a New Dixie. I know what you are thinking. Alaska is about as far north of the Mason-Dixon Line as you can get and not fall into the Arctic Ocean. There aren't any cotton fields up there and Alaska was still in Russia when we had the Civil War.

But stick with me for a moment before you give up and click away to some other blog. When states like Virginia and North Carolina are seriously considering a black man for president and even Georgia is showing signs of sanity, the old geographical Traditional Dixie is cracking up like pond ice on a warm spring day.

First of all, it's not the fault of "the market". Blaming the market for the estimated 1.7 million foreclosures this year means that no one is responsible and everyone is off the hook. But market fluctuations are not the weather, nor are they "Acts of God", to use the favorite expression of the insurance industry. Markets are constructed by real human beings. Markets have rules written by real human beings. Markets have referees and judges who are real human beings. Markets have participants who are real human beings.

Forget about the "invisible hand of the marketplace" so beloved by ivory tower econ professors and overpaid media pundits. There is no invisible hand of the marketplace. Real human hands shape the marketplace and they have left plenty of fingerprints behind. Those estimated 1.7 million foreclosures mean a lot of fingerprints.

I was raised to love this country by parents who struggled through the Great Depression and World War II. My mom once saved up 17 cents to buy her mother a coal bucket as a Christmas gift. My dad was the son of Scottish immigrants. He went to war and visited some of the worst hellholes in Europe as  the Fighting Thunderbirds of the 45th infantry went up the boot of Italy to Anzio and later to southern France and into Germany. After the war he took a job with the Veteran's Administration to help the GI's move on to better lives than the ones they had in miserable muddy foxholes.

I learned from them that poverty does not have to be permanent and that evil can be overcome. They were proud New Deal Democrats who knew that government was supposed to be of the people, for the people and by the people.

They took us kids to the Civil War battlefields around the D.C. area so we would hopefully never forget the sacrifices that it takes to advance human rights and extend freedom to all.

An old buddy of mine used to say," The hardcore Republican vote is 5% the super-rich and 95% the super-stupid." I used to believe that, but I don't believe that anymore. I believe it's 5% the super-rich and 95% the super-evil. If you need a definition of super-evil, try here.

Please note that I am not talking about the deluded and the ignorant Republican voters. The deluded can be helped to see clearly and the ignorant can be educated. I am talking about the hardcore GOP base, the people who come to McCain/Palin events and turn them into rallies reminiscent of the ones at Nuremburg in the dark days before World War II.

­­­The Straight Talk Express is arguably the most famous bus in America right now. Riding around in the conveyance favored by everyday working class people is a nice touch really. It makes McCain seem like one of us. It's true that McCain now flies around in a Boeing 737 of the same name, equipped with first class seats for himself and his entourage, but it's the bus that people see and remember.

Buses remind us of going to work bleary-eyed in the morning crowded together with lots of strangers and then coming home exhausted at night crowded together in the same way. Buses are about enduring extreme heat and cold waiting for them to arrive. They are about the fear of being late to work when you miss one, or when it breaks down or gets stuck in traffic. They are about the fear of waiting for one at night in a dicey part of town, hoping that you won't become another mugging or rape statistic.

They stand over the city like the great predatory wading birds they are named after. And from time to time, like those great predatory wading birds, they come down swiftly on those below and take a life...often more than one. They are the construction cranes, whose numbers grew with the massive lending sprees that fueled the hi-rise building boom in our great cities.

But the construction cranes don't take lives with sharp beaks and unerring vision like their avian namesakes. Instead people get electrocuted when the cranes collide with power lines, operators fall out of them, they fall on top of people, or they crush people in the other gruesome ways that heavy complex machinery can destroy the human body.