Step (1) is merely a pre-requisite (an absolute one) to achieving anything worthwhile.

Thanks for stressing this, Glenn, as I'm sure this post will get a trickle of the usual holier-than-thou cynics going on about how all who vote for the Democrats are sheeple and using Newspeak and poorly grounded hyperbole to justify their stance. I've had a lot of arguments with Nader voters, since this includes many of my friends, and what I've gathered from their statements is twofold:

The first problem is that they view voting primarily as a way to "voice your individual conscience" and make a statement rather than a way of achieving a given result. To me this seems vapid and self-centered. At least in 2000, the justification was trying to get Nader enough votes to qualify for federal funding. Now there is no such excuse. Voting does not take place in a vacuum - it is a political act with concrete consequences, not only for yourself, but for everyone else, and these consequences are more important than stroking your ego.

The second, and more extreme case, is those who claim that things need to get worse before they get better, and we need to let the right wing completely wreck the country to the point where they are either discredited forever or we have a popular uprising. This is completely naive. First of all, what we call the 'right wing' is not monolithic. The far-right populists will blame the mainstream Republicans for being too liberal, and a populist uprising in the face of economic misery may very well look more like Palin than anything 'progressive'. Remember what happened in Germany. And secondly, Americans are an amazingly complacent people. Without the economic crisis, you could have gone blue in the face waiting for popular outrage to build about torture, illegal invasions, and wiretapping. I'm pretty sure that the post-apocalyptic conditions that would be necessary for a full-scale revolt will not happen in the near future.

The fact that after the last 8 years, something like 43% of the country is still willing to vote for McCain should put to rest any hopes people have of some progressive silent majority that would set things right if only the people's voice could be heard. The reality is that, like it or not, we need to elect someone like Obama before we can elect someone like Nader or Kucinich.

Economics is not something that can be summed up in a single slogan. The Nobel Prize is awarded for specific research, not for one's overall economic or political theory, and certainly not for their overall accomplishments as a person. Friedman got the award for his analysis of consumption and monetary history. Krugman got it for his work on trade theory and economic geography. I am no economist, but given the complexity of the field, I'm sure the two agreed on many fundamentals.

There is also the matter of the passage of time. Friedman's theory seemed to work well directly following the crises of the 70's. After the recent crash, Krugman's ideas seem to be right. But it may very well be possible that in a few decades his current recommendations may have undesirable consequences, and that a new model will emerge. The Nobel Committee is not an oracle.

That’s not to say that some punishment — whether it’s meted out by their parents, the school or the law — isn’t reasonable in this case. After all, the general reaction to a teenage boy sending out explicit photos of himself to female classmates would likely, and rightly, be that it was sexual harassment — why should it be any different if a girl is the sender?

No, no, a thousand freaking times NO. This is exactly the kind of tit for tat attitude that perpetuates the idiotic gender wars indefinitely, a battle cry that is at different times raised up both by overzealous feminists and anti-feminist trolls like Parson Jim.

The summer after high school a couple of my friends and I received a set of 'artistic' nude photos of a girl that, unfortunately, none of us found that attractive in our email, unsolicited, as a failed attempt at seduction. We got a good laugh out of them and forwarded them to everyone we knew. Whether this makes us assholes is one matter, but for someone to say that we were victimized or assaulted and file charges on our behalf would be utterly idiotic. Granted, none of us were minors, but though I know it flies in the face of your idealized view of society to admit this, the reality is the response of most 15 year old boys to receiving naked pictures would likewise be either one of amusement or extreme gratitude.

If we accept the idea that the law exists to protect individuals as they ARE rather than to advance your ideal notions of what society SHOULD be, then the only legitimate question is whether or not any of the recipients WERE victimized. And if the answer turns out to be different depending on the recipient's gender, tough luck. Believe it or not, despite your best efforts, most people still view sex differently based on their gender. Telling them that they are being victimized even if they don't know it simply based on this dogmatic axiom of equality does not make it so.

Why is everybody in the press treating this as a 'draw' and failing to mention that within the first 40 minutes, McCain said we should FREEZE ALL SPENDING EXCEPT FOR DEFENSE? Are we on some kind of Bizzarro planet where this is completely unremarkable? How is it not a gaffe? God DAMMIT, media, when the HELL are you going to realize that you don't just report on reality, you CREATE IT?