I don't read Juan Cole often enough, but don't read anyone worth reading often enough. This was a nice return, likely the keenest insight into the sense of the Nobel award to Obama. The best thinkers and writers among us go directly to intuition when responding to world phenomena.

There seems to be a growing analysis and response to the "right wing" threat to our country, and this offering should add some momentum. Limbaugh, Beck, O'Reilly, Hannity et. al. are genuine traitors, and they should be spending the rest of their lives behind bars. They have done their best to generate hatred and violence against those they have chosen to vilify, and these attempts are crimes.

What I like most about the peace prize award is that it has stirred the cauldron, upped the ante, increased the cognitive dissonance of the demented among us. Their truer colors come out, and it's like a self-depantsing. They just can't help themselves, and expose themselves with all the compulsion of a flasher. Maybe we should send them some trenchcoats.

It's about time, but Fox really should have its license revoked. Their minions are not mere partisans, but liars and inciters. The purpose and intention is criminal.

I find it strange that even at Salon the reporting of the simplest facts is subservient to the story line of the author. Example: "A few weeks ago, when Chicago was passed over for the 2016 Summer Olympics, the White House..." The announcement was on October 2. I was in Chicago that day, and remember it well. October 2 was eleven days ago, not "a few weeks." Get it right. Get everything right. I pay to read this site. You accept that pay in exchange for getting everything right.

Then again, maybe it's much ado about not very much. The man skipped town before being sentenced for a crime he admitted to. If the legal system means anything at all, then he should be returned from whence he fled. If the law doesn't apply to him, then it doesn't apply to anyone.

When Polanski returns to L.A. his legal counsel can present mitigating evidence, evidence of remorse and rehabilitation, and whatever other information can be used to make a case for his client. But that case should be made before a judge.

I suspect that Mr. Polanski will pay a fine and be given probation, maybe a small jail sentence, but not likely. His pregnant wife was murdered by the Manson gang. He gets some consideration for that.

Even if healthcare reform includes a fair and honest pricing system for pharmaceuticals, we still will be saddled with a mafia-like medical system that mandates corporate drug treatment over all other modalities.

Doctors are conditioned to believe that dispensary of pharmaceuticals is the primary, and usually only, method of treating illness and disease conditions. This conditioning on a mass scale has turned our mainstream medical profession into a religion, a belief system that sifts all evidence through a narrow filter that excludes every other approach.

Since we all live under this system, we all are our own best research subject. In my case, I recently was afflicted with a form of rheumatoid arthritis, known as polymyalgia rheumatica. I was in intense pain from head to toe. Actually, the diagnosis is just part of the name game that goes on with disease study. The disease doesn't call itself polymyalgia rheumatica, and the pronouncement had more to do with the professional needs of the physician(s) involved. I get my care at the Madison, Wisconsin veterans hospital (V.A.), which is co-staffed by doctors from the University of Wisconsin medical school and hospital.

I was prescribed a steroid (Prednisone) for five days, which worked, and helped in the diagnosis. What really worked, though, was the diet changes and cleansings I went through that were recommended by a naturopathic physician (Aarrgh!! Get out the wooden stakes!!). By avoiding tomatoes, sugar, yeast, gluten, and soy I have been mostly pain free. My primary care physician gets pursed lips when I mention this. This same physician prescribed a medicine that reacted with another medicine, and could have killed me. Fair pricing or not, when you're dead, you're dead (apologies to the late Jerry Reed).

I also do Tai Chi, Qi Gung exercises, hatha yoga, meditation, get acupuncture treatments, and a few other things. The money mongerers of institutional medicine would prefer to lock people away for such audacity, ala McMurphy of "One flew over the cuckoo's nest" fame.

Professor Reich knows very well that the role of an economic system is to answer the questions of what, how, and for whom. What is produced, how it is produced, and who receives what is produced. So far all the talk is about the for whom factor. If we don't look at the what and how, we will be hostage to the medical mafia, and it can only get worse.

Good job on TV. Tom Tancredo looked like an impotent bully. It is a bit surreal that you would have to debate such a being in order to make some sense. Nice touch calling Dick Cheney a coward.

I think Cheney should give a speech a day until he drops. That will likely be his punishment in Hell, should such a place exist.

I don't subscribe to cable, having once worked in that industry, and was surprised at how good Ed Schultz looks on TV. I can't listen to his radio show, he's such a blowhard, but he's a pretty reserved version of himself on the small screen.

You do well on TV. You might want to choose your venues with care, staying away from Fox. Obama is smart enough to know that giving Fox access gives it legitimacy. If more journalists and others would do the same, you could drain the swamp, to coin a phrase.