Financially and fiscally, we're hanging by a thread and the grace of the Asian bankers. Their view of Obama is fairly dim, and their main worry is a trade war.

Start thinking in practical, personal terms about possible economic shocks: continued asset deflation (houses, stocks); renewed inflationary shocks in consumer prices; dollar assets being dumped, and the dollar itself dropping big. These are not likely yet. But they're live possibilities.

And tell your friends, if you care about them. They'll think you're crazy. But they will thank you later.

I'll simply repeat what I wrote earlier, with just a few modifications to reflect the outcome of this historic election:

I find that this blog is a fascinating representative sample of the current state of the American right, and provides a telling glimpse at its likely future for the next several years at least.

If this blog is any indication, then, in light of the Obama-Biden election victory, there will be little to no soul-searching, introspection, or self-examination going on in large segments of the right-wing community. Instead of performing such healthy and necessary activities, valuable time and energy amongst the right will be wasted scapegoating ACORN, liberal messianism, campaign fundraising conspiracies, insufficiently aggressive attacks over the sinister Ayers-Wright-Khalidi triangle, and, first and foremost as always, pervasive liberal media bias for the election loss.

What will go unquestioned, of course, is the quasi-religious faith amongst most of those on the right that their ideology is sacrosanct and inviolable and, indeed, preferred by the American people as a whole. (After all, don't we all know that self-questioning and a re-evaluation of one's principles are both liberal values, meant only for surrender-monkeys and hippies?)

What will be taken as axiomatic on the right, therefore, is that the success of this ideology could only have been ruined by dirty tricks on the other side and by human error and weakness amongst those on the right. If only there existed politicians who could carry right-wing ideology in its pure, unaltered state! We all know this tendency, because you hear the same thing from hard-core Marxists who are convinced to this day that despite Russia and China and North Korea, Communism really can work, if only there were pure, incorruptible Communists somewhere to put it into practice.

Despite the fact that large majorities of the American public now say in polls that the Republican party has moved too far to the right (and that the McCain campaign has been too negative, and that Obama has the highest personal approval ratings of any Democratic presidential candidate in modern history), the rank-and-file of the party believe precisely the opposite, that the Republican party needs to be even more doctrinaire and orthodox in their ideology and more aggressive in their personal attacks.

Apart from a precious few, most Republican party members will not for a moment stop to ask themselves "Are my ideas wrong? Do my ideas really work out in practice? Do my ideas really have the support of a majority of the American people?"

Indeed, how many people on this blog will pause to ask those questions of themselves before proceeding to spend the next four years fostering conspiracy theories about our new president? Soon we'll hear more about how he's not a real US citizen, how he's mixed up in secret crimes, and so forth.

So thanks for providing me with this fascinating, revealing portrait. Please go about your business. I find it fascinating, really! As you were saying, Obama and his henchmen (presumably half-Israeli Rahm Emanuel, Dennis Ross, David Axelrod, Warren Buffet, Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers, and the largest number of Jews in Congress ever) will now lead to the death of Israel, the elimination of gun rights, and the coming age of American Communism, and all because Americans couldn't see, as did both you and that foreign-policy maven Joe the Plumber, that we were electing Deval Patrick (or was it Sammy Davis, Jr.?) as our president. Oh, it's just shameful, isn't it?

Come on. Your guy can't even come up with his own lines. Almost everything he says is watered down and derivative. At least we know he reads.

Seriously. You won an election. That doesn't equate to winning the argument on policy or ideology. You would do well to be a lot less smug and at least a little more open minded about the great huge historical moments your guy is about to stumble blindly and oh so self confidently into.

Here we are, just having been slammed with an economic fiasco almost entirely created by liberal market manipulation in the name of helping the poor, and Obama is ready to go and do it again with his energy policy. He failed to learn the single lesson that a government policy maker needs to learn from this, that markets reassert themselves and when you try to manipulate them to create a desired outcome they reassert themselves violently.

If you have anything to offer other than smugness and condescension I'd love to hear it, but I doubt you do.

But do your best. Tell me which of these ideas you expect to see succeed. Failing that, tell me any reason at all you expect Obama to succeed.

God willing, the office itself will bring out the greatness in him that so far only exists in your imagination. It happens.