It is perfectly reasonable to enjoy the good that America offers, of which there is much, while criticizing the bad that it does, of which there is also much. We're good, but we're not perfect, and we can always do better. Why is this hard to understand?

My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.

-- Sen. Carl Schurz, 1872

I can only assume that the people who are calling for a nationwide return to a 55 mph speed limit have never lived anywhere between the Appalachians and the West Coast. In very large stretches of the country, driving 55 is insane. Try going from, say, Denver to Minneapolis, a route I've driven many times -- all that driving 55 will accomplish is to keep you on the road for hours longer, making you more tired and therefore more likely to have an accident.

Of course, I also drive a fuel-efficient Corolla that gets far better mileage at 75 mph than any pumped-up deathtank ever will at any speed. And I'm not especially worried about crash safety, since I keep my eyes open and avoid dangerous situations, and I know my car is agile enough for me to do that. (When I was in the Air Force, stationed in North Dakota, every winter the side of highway between town and base was just littered with pickups and SUVs. Somehow, I managed to get around just fine in my tiny Geo Storm.) I guarantee you I'm polluting a lot less than the most fuel-efficient Ford Extinction, regardless of the speed limit.

Here's a solution to fuel efficiency problems: require anyone who drives a vehicle bigger than a good-sized sedan to have a CDL. You need that pickup or SUV for your work? Fine, prove you can drive it, the same way semi drivers do. You want it to haul groceries six blocks? Well, now, you're really going to have to think about that one ...

Of course speed limits for commuters in the city aren't tied to speed limits for those driving long distances through open areas. Nobody's saying they should be. Are there really highways within the city limits of San Francisco (where I assume you live, based on your username) where the speed limits are over 55 mph? I kind of doubt it.

The point is that there's no one-size-fits-all solution. The speed limit that is appropriate for a commuter in the Bay Area is not going to be the speed limit that is appropriate on a long-distance trip through Nevada or Iowa. And people do make these trips, for a variety of reasons; any national speed limit law that refuses to take this reality into account will incur a reaction of roughly equal parts rage and mockery.

If we ever get a real, national high-speed rail network, that will help a lot. But there will still be people driving their cars at high speeds through a whole lot of mostly empty country. You just can't get around it. It makes a lot more sense to make sure those cars are fuel-efficient at any speed than to impose speed limits that in the long run won't do a whit for any aspect of the economy except increasing speeding ticket revenue ... and possibly providing a boost to rural ER's and ambulance services.

No, he couldn't. That's not how US law works. Have we suffered so much from the Bush autocracy that we've actually forgotten that the President is not free to ignore or suspend any law he disagrees with?

When I was a grunt, I never gave a damn if the guy next to me in the foxhole was straight so long as he could shoot straight. I'd love to see the military's anti-gay policies go away. But it has to be done right, which means changing the UCMJ, and that is not something Obama or any President can do on his own. And while it has a bad effect in this case, keeping DADT in place, as a matter of legal principle this is a good thing.

IaintBacchus, did no one ever explain to you the difference between military regulation and military law?

You must be aware that "we're here, we're queer, we're ___" has been used as a rallying cry by gay rights activists, in a wide variety of situations, for a very long time. If you don't like that usage of the word, you might want to take it up with those activists first, because thanks to them it's pretty much embedded in the popular mind at this point. Although "nigger" is often used by young black people to address each other (and sometimes when addressing white people too ... which, let me tell you as a white person, is a rather, um, queer experience) it hasn't become part of any widely-known slogan in the same way.

Being white, and straight, and male, I wouldn't call anyone "nigger" or "queer" or "bitch" myself, and I admit that I don't particularly like it when members of the groups to which those words are applied do it themselves. But I get the idea that reclaiming the word gives it power -- and it's really not my call to make.

She should be judged on her merits and race left out of it.

Wow, for once you've said something I agree with. When your fellow Republicans start following your advice, let us know, okay? We sure haven't seen much of that so far.

Maybe you missed this, but it wasn't straw-man PC liberals who got Afghanistan into its current mess. It was the right-wingers. In the 1980's they created the Taliban by letting the fundamentalist-ridden Pakistani intelligence services tell us which mujahedin groups to support, and in this decade they allowed them to come back to power after they were almost wiped out, by diverting our forces from Afghanistan to Iraq. Good people, Americans and Afghan, of all political stripes, are paying the price for you and your fellow neocon chickenhawks' dreams of empire.