that separation of church and state is intended to protect the church as well as the state...if I were a sincerely devout neoevangelical Christian, I would look at what Mammon and political power have done to my faith and hang my head in shame. As an evolution-believing, gay-marriage-supporting, non-fundamentalist Christian, I'm only too happy to be considered "not a real Christian" by the folks who brought us the Bush doctrine of presidential infalibility, too many sex scandals involving entitled white men to name or number, and decades of anti-tax, pro-gun, anti-public education, and anti-science nonsense in the name of Jesus.

In "Atlas Shrugged," apparently all the creative industrialists, scientists, engineers, artists and so on go on strike to show how essential they, the "mind" of society, are to the lives of the drones amongst whom they live.

Just imagine if all the bond traders, commodities speculators, house flippers, debt repackagers, mortgage-resellers--you know, the ones who have added so much value to our economy--were to do that in the real world. I shudder to think how bad off we'd be. Now imagine that the patriots on Fox and other cable TV stations, and the sages at the Hoover Institute, had called in sick with them...I think I need to breathe into a paper bag to keep from fainting...the horror...

Wow. Thanks, Michelle Malkin, for putting it all into perspective for us.

P.S. I assume that former Sen. Ted Stevens will be available to provide tech support for the new Internet venture of these daring neo-Objectivists.

Ayn Rand is to "Lil' Orphan Annie" as Michelle Malkin is to "Mallard Fillmore."

Just sayin'.

"Did he comport himself as a gentleman? Hardly."

Clearly Mr. Cramer would be within his rights to demand satisfaction for this egregious slight. I'm sure his seconds will call on Stewart's seconds, assuming that he (the bounder!) has any.

I'd watch a sabre duel (or better, a cream pie fight) between Cramer (his second: Glenn Beck) and Stewart (seconded, naturally, by Stephen Colbert). Such a contest on the field of honor would elevate the level of our public discourse at least as much as the Cramer Unreality Tour, now in progress.

...so please let's cool it with the kick-out-Texas talk. Perry and the white right-wing oligarchy he represents is toast in a generation or so anyway--check out the demographic data:

http://www.dallasfed.org/research/pubs/fotexas/fotexas_petersen.html

Quite an argument for the continued existence of live, brick-and-mortar, boots-on-the-ground reporters, isn't it?

to give 60-second mini-commentaries on NPR's "Marketplace" as the token liberal, then give the print equivalent here while garbed as some sort of wise pragmatist. I agree with letter writers who have said that these potshot quickies he's been writing are too glib, too superficial; we expect and need more from Reich.

How about a long, detailed chronicle of his role in formulating the Clinton Administration's economic policies? I'd love to know how and why the decisions were made that prolonged and deepened, the deregulatory, anti-labor climate that Clinton inherited from Reagan and Bush Sr. Maybe in giving us that story he could explain what standing he has to opine about the current situation.

Them other tectonic plate things may have moved around some, but everybody knows that Texas has always been in exactly the same position, and everything else sort of floats around it. Hey, teach the controversy, right?

and claim that the pokey rate of the appeals process is denying the people of Minnesota their constitutionally mandated equal representation in the U.S. Senate for an unacceptably long time? I don't think he'd need to prove an intention to keep the seat vacant for partisan reasons (although that's clearly what's behind this); he would simply point to Article I, section 3. Just wondering.

What's WRONG with the world?

Since Norm Colesoreloserman won't let him take his Senate seat, he should tour the country doing standup comedy, only this time all he has to do is report, verbatim, exactly what the GOP is doing to obstruct and obfuscate. Without the duties of a senator to hold him back, Franken can still serve as a one-man truth squad telling Americans what they need to hear about the ongoing deceit of the party that would rather disenfranchise Minnesota in the U.S. Senate than obey the dictates of due process.

I listened to him declare his candidacy back in '07 and I thought, damn, maybe he's not the pretty boy centrist southern Democrat flavor of the month I thought he was. At the time (as now), hearing a mainstream American politician mention the word "poverty" and at least pretend that it concerned him was pretty refreshing.

Then I kept hearing him loop parts of that speech on every occasion. He soon distinguished himself in my mind from the many other Democratic presidential hopefuls by having only one talking point, whereas even the lamest of his competitors had at least two or three. It ultimately hit me that this guy was like William Jennings Bryan, who was compared to the River Platte--just six inches deep and a mile wide at the mouth.

So to discover that he is another charming user (which is almost an entrance requirement for becoming a politician, anyway) whose sociopathic delusions allowed to him to lie to his wife, the voters, and himself didn't surprise me excessively. We dodged a bullet with this guy.

can approach the reality of Michael Steele's own pronouncements. Either he is an intelligent, educated man masquerading as an ignorant buffoon, or an ignorant buffoon who somehow bluffed his way through Johns Hopkins and Georgetown Law. A third possibility is that at some point along the way he himself crossed over from being one of the latter to being one of the former, enabled by the bizarre reverse-reverse affirmative action that seems to socially promote tokens like Steele within the neocon counterculture and its electoral arm, the GOP.