... if we truly believe she is.

Yes, I know about the origin of the word "hysteria" and the long, sad history of labeling women as insane to dismiss their concerns. But there are a lot of genuinely crazy people in the world, and (I'm guessing) about half of them are women; it is absurd to say that we should refrain from pointing out individual craziness simply because the person exhibiting the crazy behavior happens to be female.

FWIW, I and many people I know, male and female alike, were calling Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al. "wack jobs" or something similar long before Palin came on the national scene. Insanity knows no gender.

Marriage has, at various times in various places, been defined as a union between one man and one woman, between one man and several women, between one woman and several men, and -- yes -- between two men or two women. (It has also, of course, well within living memory in the US, been defined strictly as a union between a man and a woman of the same race.) It's an institution with a much more complex history than you give it credit for.

And dismissing the argument as "puerile" or claiming that others are "inferring" meaning in the words you clearly wrote won't make the question go away. If you believe, as you have stated, that marriage and/or civil union should be (your words) "reserved for heterosexual couples with the capability of reproduction and child rearing," then how do you reconcile this belief with marriage between a man and a woman who, due to age or medical reasons, cannot reproduce? If you can't answer this question, then your argument falls apart.

No. The Republican Party is "severely underperforming," because after eight years of Republican misrule the American people are finally waking the hell up. The Republican leadership will no doubt spend a great deal of time on minutiae, dissecting all the ways they think McCain went wrong. What they will never admit is that nobody -- not McCain, not Romney, not Giuliani, not Jesus Christ Himself returned to earth (although in that last case I'm pretty sure He'd have come back as a Democrat) -- could have done better in the wake of Republican policies and the ruin Republicans have inflicted on the nation. It's not poor John McCain's fault that he's twenty points down in the polls from Bush's results. It is the fault of a once genuinely grand old party that has sold itself out to fools and fanatics, and is now paying the price.

Blame the people who thought Bush and Gore were same-same and didn't do the most basic homework to see how different they were.

Indeed. Another name for these people is "Nader voters." And if less than half of them had bothered to think before they voted, we'd now be discussing who would follow Gore's second term. So no, we can't entirely blame Nader himself, but we can damn sure blame him and the idiots who fell for his cult of personality.

... but nearly the entire Midwest went for Obama (Missouri is still too close to call as I write this; if Obama takes it, the Midwest will be a sweep.) It's in the South and West, not Midwest, that the Republicans hang on. As a Westerner, I'm not all that happy about this -- although as a Coloradan, I at least know my state did the right thing. Just thought I'd point this out.

The entire argument boils down to this:

"Democrats can't win the South, and shouldn't bother."

"But Obama won Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida, and they contributed a lot to his victory!"

"Oh, well then, those places aren't really the South."

This is a classic "No True Scotsman" argument. I kind of suspect that if in 2012, Obama wins every former Confederate state except for Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee (not likely, but I can dream) you'll explain to us how that's the real South, and the rest doesn't count. Funny thing is, a lot of unreconstructed rebs would agree with you. How does it feel to have so much in common with the white-sheet-and-pointy-hat crowd?

The Democratic Party, like all political parties in the US, is a voluntary organization. Nobody is drafted into the party. There are no legal consequences to being or not being a member. Kicking Lieberman out of the party caucus, to paraphrase Jefferson (who was speaking on an issue for which I suspect Lieberman has little respect, but that's neither here nor there) would neither pick his pocket nor break his leg. We're talking about the actions of a political association, not the authority of the US government.

If a Ford executive went traveling around the country telling people to buy Chevys, how long do you think he would keep his job? If a Catholic bishop appeared almost daily on TV exhorting people to become Protestants, what sort of view do you suppose the Vatican would take of that? If a school principal spent his days urging students to drop out, would you consider it a violation of his rights for the school board to impose some penalties?

... because both of them are playing the character Ian Fleming actually wrote. I have to wonder if any of the "it's good, but it's not Bond" crowd have ever read any of Fleming's novels? The hostility Dalton got always confused me, and I'm glad Craig is getting such kudos for bringing the original character to the screen.

It's not surprising that he lionizes Bill Gates. Both of them specialize in making money off shallow presentations of other people's deep ideas, adding nothing original or worthwhile, but raking in tons of cash along the way.