I wonder if Rome abrogated elements of their morality as they crumbled, too.

The only problem here is that he didn't call the entire Fed board and Treasury Department "whores".

And yes, this is an insult to hardworking and frequently exploited sex workers. At least they earn their money and don't just demand they be given their entitlement.

It's not the quantity that I (and others) have a problem with, Andrew, but the *quality*.

Let the outrage queens over at the War Room handle this pifflery. You are generally better than this. Is all of Salon lost now? Thank heavens for Glenn Greenwald...

If it weren't for about 100 versions of Windows I'd think you were nuts.

Obama just have the SS seal the doors shut before his speech and light the place on fire? Serious question.

...except of course when that individual is a 3-day-old clump of cells floating down a fallopian tube. Right-wing logic is complicated.

http://begthequestion.info/

Read it, learn it, live it. I don't know what they teach in college these days - it's clearly neither grammar nor logic.

The genius of the Bush administration, and Rove himself, was that they successfully managed to embark on what were, or would have been if the truth had been disseminated by the media (ha!), very unpopular policies and programs with little regard to their popularity. Privatizing Social Security, for example. That particular one failed, but with little political cost to the administration. They were mainly able to do this by generating emotionally charged wedge issues (gay marriage, danger of terrorism) and overshadowing the actual important issues of the day.

gosh THAT was easy!

is Al Sharpton a member of the "cultural left"? Give me a break.

"Despite the obvious HAL comparisons, we learn very early on that Gerty is devoid of human emotion..."

HAL's problem was not that he had developed emotional attachments to people or events that clouded his judgement. His problem was that he had two conflicting sets of orders at the highest level - one set to preserve and protect humans at all cost, and another (secret) set to preserve the mission at all costs. When the two orders came into direct conflict, HAL's apparent behavior seemed erratic and illogical to the crew, who were not aware of the second set of orders. HAL was simply trying to do the best he could given a paradoxical situation.

If the masterminds behind 9/11 wanted to do great harm to the US and force a change in the way we live, they have succeeded beyond their wildest expectations. Every futilely spent dollar in Iraq, every bomb that drops on civilians in Afghanistan, every prisoner "renditioned" and every atrocity perpetrated by Israel that our government tacitly endorses demonstrates how far down the rabbit hole we've been led. We give so much power to violence, both as the cause of conflict and the cure for it - why would a zealot think twice about murder or mayhem?

It's long been known that the vast majority of viral human contagious diseases is the direct product of (unhealthy) livestock farming. Any misdirection smacks of industry obfuscation.

We get it. GOP bad. They're hypocrites to the core - political opportunists with zero scruples and even fewer principles. There's no road too low for them to take in the service of the larger goal of frightening the people in submission while reinforcing the rule of the oligarch. They're sociopathic sadists with no morality or conscience. We get it.

Now, how are the Democrats these days any better?

"Everyone who's ever used a computer keyboard on any platform knows that the key will delete the character to the left of the cursor."

No - the Delete key in Windows (and to my knowledge, all other OSes that use a 101- or 104-key keyboard) deletes to the right of the cursor. The Backspace key deletes to the left.

so I gather the Mac has no 'Backspace' key? and it seems odd that one would prefer a forward-delete over a backwards one, but that's just me.

So what the hell does the 'Delete' key do on a Mac, if not delete the character to the right of the cursor?

The federal debt on January 1. 2001 was about $5.6 trillion. The federal debt on January 20, 2009 was about $10.6 trillion. The projected federal deficit under Obama's first budget was $1.7 trillion, which no one, including Obama himself, who has said so, believes will continue after fiscal year 2009. Even if it did, 4 x $1.7 = $6.8 trillion, which is considerably less than the $10.6 trillion of all previous administrations combined.

Never mind that Bush ran his deficit up during what was ostensibly a GOOD economy, for the most part. Deficit spending is a stimulant for tough times, and a foolish endeavor otherwise. But please try and give at least reasonably plausible numbers along with your alarmist GOP talking points. Whic hare the utter height of human hypocrisy, by the way.

I'm not sure that "cool" is the correct word to describe this.

TOO BIG TO FAIL! WHO COULD HAVE SEEN IT COMING? IT'S AN EMERGENCY! WITH US OR AGAINST US! BETTER TO ACT NOW THAN WAIT FOR THE ANSWER IN THE FORM OF A MUSHROOM CLOUD!

a good thing? Isn't that the same group that signed off on the Iraq War, decades of deficit spending, The War on Drugs, the War on Terror, blah blah etc.? Does Obama have a long-term vision and plan for Afghanistan any more than Bush did for Iraq? Does the plan involve anything more than kicking in a bunch of house doors, buying off warlords and the occasional JDAM landing in a wedding cake? Seven years ago, when we first landed in Kabul, a friend and I joked that Afghanistan had brought down the Soviet Union, and that maybe it was our turn. Not so much of a joke, now, is it?