Even if offsets are "just indulgences", the fact that a company that wants to pollute would have to "buy an indulgence" is still an improvement, because it means that company's cost for polluting has increased. The company will now have an incentive to cut costs by reducing its pollution, or it will have to pass on those costs to its customers (which will encourage those customers to buy their products elsewhere).

Anything that reduces externalities is a step in the right direction.

If you have to include a question mark in your headline, that means you need to go back and do more research before posting anything. That way you'll have an actual story (you know, with information in it) and not just your own idle speculations to write about.

The Republicans don't want you to die. That's a nasty misrepresentation of their position.

It's just that they don't much care whether you live or not.

What they care about is regaining political power and servicing their financial benefactors. If they thought that implementing universal healthcare would help them achieve those goals, they would do it. But since the cause of universal healthcare has been taken up by their opponents, then of course they have to be against it. Otherwise they would be redundant with the Dems.

But please don't confuse their complete unconcern with actual malice -- that would be wrong.

Just because somebody's case of swine flu resulted from their own irrational stupidity doesn't mean they can't pass it on to you.

One way to deal with the problem would be announce to the tabloids and the Internet that you will be spending the weekend at a nude beach, in the nude.

Then do it.

After that weekend, any pervert who wants to see you naked will be able to Google for footage of you at the nude beach. Therefore there will be very little incentive for voyeurs to stalk your hotel room for additional footage, and you no longer have to live a life of fear and paranoia.

Just a thought.

What I think will happen:

1) The bill will pass, because those legislators who feel they can't vote for a public option will have an out

2) Five to ten red states will threaten to opt out, and one or two of them will actually follow through and do it

3) After a few years, the states that opted out will opt right back in again, their citizens having finally realized that they are missing out on a good thing.

How long should a major health care reform package for a nation of 250 million people be?

I'd imagine anything short enough to please the Republicans would also be so full of loopholes and unintended consequences as to be useless. Something that the Republicans would be more than happy to point out if the Democrats' bill was short.

If I was hiring a brain surgeon to remove a tumor from my head, I wouldn't look for the surgeon who loves me the most. I'd look for the surgeon who was most highly skilled and conscientious.

Honestly, do people think Obama would do a better job running the country if he wore 6 flag pins every day and teared up whenever the national anthem played? A person like that would be much more likely to screw things up, since his patriotic emotionalism would get in the way of making rational decisions.

Just reading the review made me cringe enough. I don't think I need to spend money on this when I could just pay someone $10 to run their fingernails down a blackboard for 90 minutes instead.

Mr. Limbaugh sounds like what he really wants is someone just like Obama, except espousing conservative ideas.

I think what Mr. Limbaugh doesn't realize is that it's extremely difficult to sound convincing and reasonable when the ideas you're pushing are intellectually and morally bankrupt. Mr. Limbaugh's ideal politician exists, her name is Sarah Palin, and it doesn't matter how well she can deliver her lines when the lines themselves are the problem.

Once they're a different species, it will finally be legal to eat the rich!

Very informative. Perhaps you can interview Bill O'Reilly next? I've always wondered what his opinion of Obama might be.

If you leave your laptop logged in and unattended, or if you tell people your password, then anyone with physical access to the laptop can read all the email stored on it, and all the other files on it as well.

That is true whether you have Google Dashboard installed or not.

If that worries you, the solution is to screen-lock your laptop when you step away from it, so that you have to enter your password before it will re-allow access to the GUI. If you're really paranoid, you could go further by using full-drive encryption, or by simply not keeping any sensitive data on the laptop in the first place.

Google Dashboard didn't introduce the privacy problems you're worried about; it only made them more apparent to you.

Yes, it is still misogynist.

Strangely enough, women are also capable of hating, hurting and abusing women, just as blacks are capable of hating, hurting and abusing blacks, and so on. Nobody gets a free pass just because of their genes.

Salon: "Here's an article describing just how shocking and depraved this video is. Oh, and right under this paragarph we've helpfully placed an embedded video player so you can watch the video yourself."

There's a thin line between news and promotion, isn't there?