. . . if you are thinking of really small communities (think farming towns of the 1800s).

Christ talked about how good people should live, and that included things like feeding your neighbor when he's starving.

That's a PERSONAL responsibility--it's not something to be offloaded onto "the government." And that's what distinguishes "communism"--the notion that the government is the *agent* of social welfare.

Christian teaching is full of fables/parables/examples of the guy with nothing doing and giving all he could to help others. That is the theme of the teaching--it is not that "to be a good Christian you should elect people to positions of government office so that they can enact laws to do what YOU SHOULD BE DOING ALREADY, YOU LOUSY HYPOCRITES." -- blunderdog

But we don't live in small farming communities (thank God - pun intended) any longer, and most people aren't really Christians (I haven't read too much that say Jews or Muslims are any better at this), so "Christian charity" as it has been seen in the U.S. historically doesn't have much meaning any more.

Even if all the churches in the U.S., especially all the hypocritical Evangelical mega-churches, many rolling in money, decided to dedicate most of their efforts to social mission, there are simply too many people needing help.

So, regardless of whatever form of government you want to tee-off on, the state needs to step in because private citizens by themselves or even in groups can't get it done and, naturally, corporation mostly couldn't care less (seen their health plan these days?) nor do they exist for this purpose. Many corporations do positive things in their communities, but it's mostly window dressing or support for the arts.

The government is the only entity large enough to undertake social welfare, and citizens have a vested interest in supporting this for the betterment of their communities and the nation. Can it be done better than it is being done now? Probably. Is there waste? Undoubtedly. But, regardless, education and health care are appallingly underfunded in this country, and I'd rather see money "wasted" on these than wasted on weapons procurement.

And, yes, there is a place in all this for religious organization to participate, but only if they keep their religion to themselves and refrain from discriminating, two things most of them seem to have a great deal of difficulty with.

. . . it all the woman's fault. If she'd been in a burqa . . .

A thoughtful man like President Obama is likely just checking out those stylish sandals to see if he should buy a pair for Michelle. -- J T

Mrs. Obama is sartorially very much her own woman. But sandals at a state function of any kind? Tsk, tsk.

. . . this bill isn't even a good starting point.

A carbon tax is the only thing that will truly force the biggest polluters to either clean up their plants or get out of the business. (Or convince most people to stop driving anything with a V-8 engine that weighs over three tons.)

Even if you are a climate change denier, cleaner air has obvious benefits, and burning oil and natural gas to generate power is stupid at this point in human history. We depend on too many petroleum derived materials to be wasting oil for power generation.

If you need to buy out the coal and oil fired plants to shut them down, so be it. If this results in the end of coal mining in the U.S., so be it. A one time buy out of this industry would be pretty small potatoes compared to bailing out the banks and auto companies.

And then there are China and India . . .

. . . about how poor American secondary school students perform in "standardized international" math and science comparisons. The only problem with this meme is that the top ten percent of U.S. students is still in the top ten percent of the world in terms of "smarts."

America still leads the world (unless something changed since the article was written) in the number of research universities, etc., etc. The reason dicks like Bill Gates defend upping H1 visas is not because we can't produce sufficient numbers of skilled techies and the like, it's because India and China produce too many to be absorbed by their economies (neither perched to overtake the U.S. or even Japan in spite of all the nonsense written about this) and they will work for peanuts.

If anyone can point to significant studies that show otherwise, please do. But using shitty American movies and bad Chricton fiction as your touchstone of just how anti-intellectual America is on the whole is unconvincing and stupid.