At times it seems like there are two administrations with very different attitudes toward civil liberties. I think I'm starting to see a pattern. When it comes to policies and most appointments, Obama is what we hoped for. For example, the quick decision to withdraw all authorizations of torture, and the two appointees the GOP are fighting on spurious grounds because they opposed Bush's civil liberties policies.

However, it seems Bush policies are standing in inherited court cases, no matter how ludicrous. Does anyone else see this? And what would explain it?

I'll come to the wingnut's defense on one point. A couple commenters accused him of getting his facts wrong about coal in Minnesota, but he didn't say we produce it. He said we get a lot of our electricity from it, and that's true, though it's news to me we rely on coal more than the average state.

No the questions: you seem to have misunderstood liberals' questions about Bachmann. Lots of people are forthrightly conservative, but we're wondering why conservatives tolerate her apparent disconnection from reality, like her belief the dollar is about to get replaced as our currency. She just said that Keith Ellison is acting as a Muslim talent scout to bring Muslims into the federal government. Why do conservatives let her say lunatic things like that without risking a primary challenger, or at least denunciation elsewhere on talk radio?

Second, for another topic, you made an off-hand negative reference to France. Why do conservatives hate France? This is a country we've never had hostilities with, that never did anything to us, that helped us in Afghanistan --- so why do you hate the French? Are they the last ethnic group against whom bigotry is acceptable?

http://minnesotaindependent.com/31856/bachmann-obama-bowing-lying

I still like having my print newspaper to read on the train while commuting, or to carry with me to read at lunch. My computer doesn't do that. My print edition has all the comics together, and all the sports statistics in a much more usable form than poking around through the web.

Those are just conveniences of course. The main thing is daily newspapers not only perform most investigative journalism, they do almost all of it at the state and local level. I hate to say raise my subscription rate, but, raise my subscription rate. For more content and fewer ads, it's worth it.

Meanwhile, if journalism has to be done on a membership model, so be it. It works for NPR and PBS. So it becomes up to readers to pay up and make it work.

Of course he did. Every president has used them since Eisenhower. You have a problem with that? Before that they cheated --- by writing out their speeches on paper. How dreadful.

If people can't figure out by now that Obama really understands this stuff, I don't know what to tell them.

There isn't any substitute for massive government spending that' spent on the right things. Build what will help the economy long term, like a new health insurance system and schools and roads, and thereby help in the short term by putting paychecks in the hands of otherwise unemployed people who will build these things. Even those people newly employed people spend the money very frugally, they'll still spend it. Maybe they only make needed repairs to their houses, but those need repairs still mean jobs for construction workers, window manufacturers, etc. Even if they just buy food, that means jobs at the supermarket and all the way down to the farm. If they fix their cars instead of buying new, that still means jobs for mechanics and parts manufacturers.

That's the short term multiplier effect. Long term, money spent on schools should mean a better educated and thereby more productive population. Money spent on our health insurance system will mean a healthier and more productive population plus ongoing savings on administration. Money spent on roads should speed up traffic and thereby lower transportation costs for everybody.

Please tell me that after so succinctly putting the press in its place about dog, he got no more questions about it. Surely his answer showed who was the big dog in the room.

...I recollect how I keep having to explain that Michell Bachmann represents only one district of my state, and the Norm Coleman show is starting the curtain call on closing night, but is still in the national headlines. I'm ready to believe most Texans are embarrassed by Perry and the buffoons in the legislature, and the recognize that secessionists are a dangerous but lunatic fringe.

Anyway, given demographic trends and the lack of a Texan on the GOP ticket, Texas might be a swing state in 2012. As much as we get visceral pleasure by responding to calls for secession by saying "bye!", it will feel better to win the state for the rational side.

I'm OK with Obama exempting CIA personnel from prosecutions for relying on those memos. I don't care about the junior field agents: prosecute the directors. It's like the armed forces prosecuting enlisteds but not officers. That provides no deterrent to the people at the top because they'll always expect prosecutions to happen only at the bottom, whereas prosecutions at the top will stop them giving authorization for torture to the people who actually have to do it.

It seems like making more of the Social Security defeat than it really was. Bush certainly suffered a stinging defeat when Congress wouldn't even take it up, but don't forget that Republicans called 2005 "the year from Hell", because at the same time Social Security privatization failed, the Republicans injected themselves into the Terri Schiavo controversy with Jeb Bush being the leader on that fiasco, and then came Hurricane Katrina. The combination of those in such a short time did in Bush. Any one was quite survivable.