Meanwhile, at a radio show's live remote location: So, hi, everyone, thanks for coming out and joining us today!  Raise your hand if you paid no attention whatever to yesterday's GOP voting.  Boy, people were calling it all sorts of things -- we heard Super Tuesday, Souper Bluesday, Stooper Duesday, Stupid Foolsday, Stupor Ghoulsday, even Blooper Toolsday. OK, good, thank you.

We have some lovely runner-up, parting gifts for you, for all of you who raised your hands, if you'll please follow our staff -- yes, there they are -- back out to our vans in the mall parking lot. Give them a nice round of applause, everyone -- what great sports, thanks for coming by The Really Big Maul Shopping Arena today!

The stock markets in the US dropped 1.5% today from the renewed sturm und drang over the potential Greek bond default. The Euro zone is trying to force a 50% haircut on the holders of Greek bonds in order to avoid their default, but the catch is that it has to be “voluntary”. If it’s not, it becomes an “actual” default and those CDOs (credit default swaps) start kicking in.

The problem with these insane contract arrangements is that they can be triggered by any significant down turn, not just by a major default. A down grade in a credit agency’s rating of a bank or a nation state will do it. They’re all done in secret, so we have no real idea what the risk really is It was a cascade of derivative failures tied to consumer debt, mostly home mortgages, that brought us within a hair’s breadth of ending civilization in 2008.

We must have had superpowers back then, in July, 1969, hurling so many tons into space, making a bull's-eye landing on the moon.  It would be easy to think so.  We look around today, see how fractured we are from one another, still fracturing more each day, split this way and that.

In the 60's we had to overcome our infighting and apply ourselves to defeat a common perceived threat:  loss of leadership in the world, handing off to another country.  In the two-thousands, the enemy is us, as Pogo long ago said.  The enemy is also the shift from the all people in this land, to just some of the people.

The final frontier is not about the space outside us, it is about the space within us:  The ability to believe in ourselves, to get out of our own way, to get to that sweet point in any project where we step back and say, Wow -- how did we do that, anyway?

The first frontiers are down here, on Earth, of course, trying to make sense of any of our lives, trying to find perspective to lend meaning to what can increasingly be seen as randomized, cascading bursts and bubbles of reason and insanity, with reason riding a pendulum that's swung way out of orbit, no idea when it could be back.

It's been one wimpering bellow and simpering cacophony after another with these guys, all this empty and voidful claptrap called the GOP candidacy, or coronation, or whatever half-baked appellation you'd care to make of this clammy, hammy, clambake.  Now, to steal a dribble from basketball, welcome to Super Tuesday -- March Madness, Republican Style!  This is a most appropriate banner to stretch over these four lame and leftover horsemen of the GOP Apocalypse, all saddled up on their pygmy ponies, ready to joust with feather pillows.

In the English language, it's a shame we aren't allowed to add exponents to some descriptors, can't add a "power" sign at the end. We could not create this in current grammar:  "Newt is a liar, cheat, and a sneak thief ^ 56," which would be saying Newt's to the power of 56 in terms of liar-cheat-sneak-thief-iness times itself -- 56 times in all.  Just as five-squared means five times five, Newt to the 56th power would mean, well, a wet cleanup on aisles 5 through 9,472, at the least.

Once again, Republican party opinion leader Rush Limbaugh leads the way for all who lend him their ears -- you'd have to, of course.  He's deaf from all the drugs that he took.  To get back at us for his lapse in judgment, his slow-catching-on, he's been lashing our ears all along, trying to blow them out on us, too.  He's been showing the party faithful how to be virtuous, how to be courageous, how to verbally lash a young woman.  Finally, he hit an uncallused part of our ears, got a reaction -- we are suddenly surprised.

Ol' Rush has been banking fortunes out of shoveling crap into our ears for some time.  We give him permission to do so every time we turn on the radio, invite him in for a while.  He's at home money-grubbing, spewing lies, and whipping out racist slurs, but Rush is flexible. He's added a new skill:  Skinning a young woman alive, using only sharpened words.  Quite a demonic resume you have there, Rush.  Happy with your list of achievements?  He laughs us off, of course, all the way to the bank.