I can't believe this is even controversial

The presidential campaign this year is essentially a contest between semi-sanity and florid psychosis. Apart from the side shows about whether Mitt's tenure at Bain Capital produced a net gain or loss of jobs, and whether Obama is a "real" American, the substantive issues at stake are principally:

1. Should the government regulate banking and finance, or does removing the oppressive hand of the state liberate capitalists to create wealth and jobs?

Mitt -- what planet do you live on? Have we already forgotten what happened in 2008? Here's a view from the land of bangers and mash that would be a voice crying in the wilderness here. The "Free Market" you worship is a fiction. Markets in complex societies are not forces of nature, they are creations of the state. They cannot exist without continuous, fundamental government intervention. The only question is how they will be regulated, on whose behalf. You want to regulate markets for the benefit of a fraction of one percent of the very wealthiest people. And no, they are not job creators nor will increasing their wealth at the expense of the rest of us somehow make us better off in the end. That is utterly preposterous. Astonishingly, half of the voters seem to believe it.

2. Should government take action to protect the planetary environment? Or is environmentalism a scam to suck up grant funding and impose socialist tyranny?

The truth is starting to penetrate even people coal country.  But here's the really bad news: We may be facing an immediate planetary emergency as methane outgasses from the melting arctic. The most terrifying crisis in human history -- at least since our ancestors passed through an unexplained population bottleneck 2 million years ago -- is not even an issue in the campaign. Never mentioned.

3. Should we forbid women to control their own reproduction because God says so?

Actually, it isn't God, it's a few depraved, ostensibly celibate old men wearing medieval costumes, and some con artists sucking up millions of dollars from suckers. God apparently didn't get around to saying this until approximately the late 19th Century,  because there is not one word about abortion or contraception anywhere in the Bible, Old Testament or New. This ought to be embarrassing to the preacherly grifters, who can find verses in Leviticus telling us to stone homosexuals to death. (Somehow they skipped the ones about driving people with rashes into the desert to die).

And yet, Republicans can actually win elections with this crap. If it happens in November, we are doomed.