LHR - the only airport where I've missed a connection, and an international one at that! LHR is great as a destination airport, bad as a departure aiport, and absolutely horrible as a transfer airport. Its only redeeming feature is the Tube link. I prefer Gatwick on average, although the last time I flew out of Gatwick American Airlines has about three people to process about 800 passengers for the only two flights of the day, which curiously left at the same time.

CDG - If you can use the Air France terminal, it's lovely I think. Terminal 1 is freakish and scary.

Frankfurt - my favorite European airport. I didn't quite understand the comment about people not flying to or from Frankfurt. Lots of people live in SW Germany. (I did for two years.) Frankfurt does one better than Heathrow: fast trains can be taken from the airport to all sorts of destinations throughout Germany.

As for US airports: O'Hare is definitely the worst, though JFK is a close second. Logan (Boston) was notorious for years for having terrible security - hopefully they've picked that up since 9/11, though I haven't been there recently so I couldn't say. Atlanta is allegedly bad but I have had decent experiences there. McLaren (Las Vegas) has had horrible problems with lines at security in recent years - I hope they've fixed that problem. Pittsburgh has a suprisingly nice airport to change at if you are flying US air. The biggest annoyance with DCA (National, not Ray-gun) is the extra security there, esp. the "don't stand up for 45 minutes" rule flying in and out. (That was the silliest security rule until the 'no liquids' rule reared its ugly head.)

It really is amazing that Tony Snow cannot admit that the tens of thousands of people being killed in Iraq as a result of the American presence are, in fact, Iraqis. This myth of "foreign fighters" really has amazing persistency in Wingnuttia, despite its apparent improbability. I do think it makes for a quick litmus test for pundits on how serious they are about the war in Iraq. Anybody who blames the violence on "foreign terrorists" should be dismissed as a propagandist or an idiot, and probably both.

I don't know when moral blindness became such a feature of American culture. Some people say it's always been there, but I really don't think that the political leaders of the 40s would have so actively engaged in gulag tactics the way the Bush/Cheney administration has.

Good thing impeachment is "off the table". One wouldn't want to be considered "shrill" by the cocktail-party set.

Can you believe that, for decades, Germans and Japanese who had fought against the US in WWII were allowed to live normal lives in peace, rather than be shackled in eternal, justice-free prison camps? What was Truman thinking? After all, merely thinking of being an enemy of the United States ought to be punishable not merely by law-free imprisonment and torture, that kind of existence should go on forever.

Habeas corpus is such a 2nd millenium concept after all. Here in the Thrid Millenium, we know that might makes right, people can never be trusted, and Evildoers should be locked away FOREVER.

Tiberius: channeling the spirit of Torquemada since no concept is too outdated for the supporters of authoriatiarnism.

It is true that one of the purposes of an op-ed is to propagate a story that most intelligent readers would immediately recognize to be hopelessly false. And, yes, a certain percentage of the mouth-breathing population will buy any absurd line of logic that the administration deigns to feed them. But that's not the only purpose being served here.

What the administration is trying to do here is assert their power. When a government asserts a bold-faced lie in a national newspaper like the NY Times, and refuses to admit reality, what they are doing is asserting their power to cow people who would disagree with their spin on events. That brutish disregard for traditional notions of epistemology is a powerful political tool. Unfortunately for us, it is rarely used for good, and, as Josh Marshall has reminded us again today, authoritarianism and incompetence tend to go together hand in hand.

The American republic is in ill health right now because the decision-making processes have decided to consciously divorce themselves from reality. We are apparently supposed to follow the lead of two men from Yale, one a cheerleader C student, the other a man who flunked out, and think that they represent the best minds in the country. From the recent series in the Post, it seems clear that the bold brushstrokes of the Bush administration policies have all come from the mind of Dick Cheney. Why do we tolerate this nonsense? People like Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, who think that if we just wait around for 18 months, all of these problems will go away, have either not been paying much attention for the past 15 years or are indifferent to the cancer of authoritarianism that has been growing in the United States, hand in hand with corporate domination and the class war that the top 1% have been waging on everybody else.

People in Europe are not "suffocating from taxes", FWIW. That's just a talking-point made by rich Americans who want to keep all the money they "earn".

In any case, having a "private health care system" manages to cost your average American more per capita than the socialized systems in Europe. The alleged benefit of having any industry private instead of public is because the "efficiency of the market" makes it cheaper. Curiously, that isn't happening with health care. Consumers do not have an elastic demand: people who need health care need it, so the costs get paid regardless of how high they are. Suppliers have ended up taking advantage of this fact to gouge consumers (and by "suppliers" here I mean insurance companies, not physicians, who also get screwed over by insurance companies.)