I guess it depends upon whether you're talking about personal wealth or the wealth of society. If you're talking about personal wealth, then I guess the cost of labor -- you know, paying the people who actually run the businesses -- would be a wealth destroyer for those who own the businesses, but I'd like to see them run their businesses without labor. But if you're talking about the overall wealth of society, then it's just the opposite. In that case, the top 5% destroy the wealth of society since most of the wealth they create is staying in their own pocket these days.

How greedy and undemocratic the republicans are to see things the way they do. I guess it would make them jump for joy to have slavery re-instituted. That way they wouldn't have to worry about those rascally wealth destroyers and their demands for increasing the minimum wage and instituting government-run healthcare. But they wouldn't have any consumers or taxpayers either.

To all the “Blue Dog” Democrats in DC, take heed – if you like your jobs, you might should give serious consideration to the wishes of your constituents. And that doesn’t mean your corporate constituents (although there’s really no such thing as a “corporate constituent” unless entities have somehow been granted the right to vote). The American people overwhelmingly want (need) a single-payer, universal healthcare system. The only thing blocking our path to this are the blue dog democrats and their pandering to the insurance lobby in the name of being “centrists.” Being a “centrist” means you’re either a republican plant, or you’re wishy-washy and don’t want to commit either way on things. It’s a milk-toast, wimpy way of getting nothing of any consequence done and wasting everyone’s time with legislation that doesn’t do anything and doesn’t please anyone. Grow some nuts, do what you were elected to do, and QUIT acting like your corporate lobbyist friends are the ones who put you in office. The People put you in office and the People can take you out of office in a heartbeat!

The only debate that still exists about global warming is whether or not humans are causing it to accelerate. There is no doubt that the earth's mean temperature has gone up and that the glaciers are rapidly melting. There are photos of this from space. We have (had?) a chunk of ice the size of Rhode Island floating around. To further substantiate this, numerous small islands in the Pacific are disappearing that have been around for thousands of years. Whether this is a natural cycle or has been accelerated by man is neither here nor there when it comes down to it. It may be futile for us to think that mankind can do anything to start or stop such a force, but we had best be prepared for the possibility, if in no other way than to move to higher ground.

There is no earthly reason why the scientific community would all as a group conspire to make this up. You must be confusing them with the business world -- you know, the ones who put money above everything else, including the future of the planet. You know, the ones whose greed blinded them so much that, even though they knew better, took actions that have caused our economy to collapse.

I can't believe we live in a society that is so prude and stupid when it comes to sex. We all know that teenagers are sexually active. And now the girls are sowing their oats too. This generation doesn't live by the same double-standard we did where it's okay for boys to experience and revel in their own sexuality, but the girls must not do the same. In this generation there seems to be equality in the sexual arena. Thank God for that! The act these girls committed has its own built-in consequences -- their nude photos will live on the internet for posterity. But to classify this as distribution of child porn is taking a stupid adolescent mistake and turning it into a felony with permanent consequences, marking them for life.

This is why the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. And the people writing the laws have personal vested interests in the private prisons that are popping up everywhere to accommodate all the people being arrested because of the laws they've put on the books criminalizing everything. Laws, I would lie to point out, that they do not feel any obligation to follow themselves.

Lastly, I think cell phones with cameras are a bad idea for many reasons, not the least of which is that everyone has an automatic surveillance device on them at all times.....

If Bush issues a blanket pardon for everyone involved, either including or not including himself, and Congress fails to investigate in the name of bi-partisanship, then I say let all the extralegal executive power Bush granted to himself (and by proxy, the executive office) remain in place so that Obama can use that in order to do what needs to be done. President Obama can label Bush and his ilk enemy combatants and have them all "secretly renditioned" to another country and kept in one of the secret prisons established by the Bush administration. They deserve no less. Then we'll have one thing to be grateful that Bush did.