The only honest and sincere Democratic candidates out there are John Edwards and Sen. Dodd. I hope to see them as Preident and Vice-President in '09!

I quite agree. They have the right policies, and the courage of their convictions.

But if they're not on the ticket, it might not be worthwhile as a symbolic gesture to vote for them as write-in candidates. It might be better to vote for an anti-establishment candidate who can win, regardless of party, if one is available. If Ron Paul is on the Republican ticket, I might hold my nose, vote for him, and wash my hands afterwards. I'm not at all fond of Hilary, who has turned out to be such a disappointment.

I suspect that in your post to me you did not realize that my post to Aych had nothing at all to do with what was being discussed in this thread.

Nope. I got it right. I've checked the thread.

You attacked him instead answering his question, precisely as Aych predicted. And you've gotten seriously off-topic, which we recognize as a tactic used by right-wing trolls to frustrate any real discussion.

Care to summarize your take on GG's observations on media hostility toward anti-establishment candidates?

I appreciate you taking my back..

Not at all. GG watches all our backs. The least I can do is return the favor to someone else.

To go way off topic, I just wanted to mention that I never claimed a fusor was a practical reactor, merely that it worked.

Very true. But it's different from the approach by Pons and Fleishmann, which doesn't work. My mistake was in responding without first making sure about what you were referring to, and for not making that distinction clear up front.

But back to our topic.

You'll notice the rw propaganda techniques of derision, deception, and obfuscation, exposed in other GG articles, are similar to those used by poseurs in these threads. We got the gamut of them with "The Atheist Delusion".

As usual, the only way to counter them is to expose them for what they are. One technique used by the MSM, as pointed out here, is to deflect attention from the real issues by focusing on non-issues, thereby preventing the propaganda from being countered. We see a lot of this.

It's all in the Rove playbook.

There is no longer anything about Reid’s family on the R.N.C. Web site. The offending lines were removed on orders from Karl Rove.

It becomes all too clear that Reid made a deal with Rove under threat that his corruption would continue to be exposed, and that Reid's criminality would be protected if he toed the neocon line.

Busheviks characteristically reward political loyalty by protecting criminality. This kind of coercion of corrupt politicians has a long and distinguished history, and its likely many more have been similarly compromised.

Reid now has little choice but to be another neocon shill, under the cover that he's a Democrat and therefore the pretense that he's a reasonable person, and not a Republican.

Welcome to the gravy train, Mr. Reid, and congratulations on having avoided humiliation and prison.

I predict that Aycharaych will incessantly try to bait people into pointless arguments.

Translation: "I dare not answer the question. Let's cover that over by issuing a lame smear instead."

In Beltway World, anyone who objects to lawbreaking by the government and telecoms is either unserious or insincere

Anybody who gets in the way of the neocon machine gets targeted for a smear campaign. It's the old Rove playbook. And it gets worse.

Cheney to Reid: "Support our lawbreaking or we'll expose yours."

All very insidious.

I'm not trying to pick a fight, it's the only way I can get people to answer.

It's also a good way to expose the rw trolls, but they're not exactly hiding here.

You're right that the laws are in large part set up to be an insidious means of ethnic cleansing and political control. For minorities this is common knowledge, but it's carefully camoflaged for white folk as The War on This and the War on That.

These "wars" are invented on the pretext of genuine social probelms, but for the purpose of undermining democratic principles in favor of authoritarian principles.

It works for them. Anybody gets in the way, they get out the smear machine, but they can't imprison everybody, and lying propaganda is more cost-effective. For now.

The numerous dead political leaders in South Asia points to a lack of strong democratic institutions, not some idealized notion of self-sacrifice.

lune99

Quite right.

The fundamental problem of government is not governance. It's the orderly transfer of power. The Romans and the Soviets did this rather badly. Monarchies do better, but not always. Democracies, true ones and false ones, do this pretty well but tend to devolve into dictatorships, which don't even try.

We still ain't got no goddamn democracy ...

... I don't know what all the excitement is about.

Garry Owen

Sadly true. The US is a corporatist state pretending to be a democracy, but it does have orderly transfers of power, so far.

BB is celebrated for being a notorious woman in the traditionally male sport of murderous politics, and not because she actually achieved anything positive for Pakistan, because she didn't.

I can't wait for the talking heads to appear on tv and proclaim, after the umpteenth suicide bombing, that Islam is a religion of peace.

Anonymous

Islam is a religion of peace the same way Christianity is a religion of peace, except that Christianity tries to pretend that it doesn't kill off people wholesale, whereas Islam, lacking sufficient militarism, mostly does it retail and makes no such pretenses.

Hypocrisy noted.