It really does boggle the mind. The US spends more money on the military than any nation has ever done in history. We have a more dominant military position with respect to the rest of the world than any nation has ever had in history.

And for some reason, we still have a huge percentage of the population that thinks it would be intolerable to have a couple dozen prisoners transferred from an extra-legal prison in Cuba to a supermax prison in the United States.

At some point, somebody has to take on American paranoia as the root of our problems. Apparently building more and more military might is turning our populace into a more and more cowardly group of people.

Of course, weapons build a barrier between Americans and the rest of the Earth's population. It builds a national insularity that erodes the ability to understand simple human psychology.

I hadn't noticed.

Part of the reason for the massive vote in the Senate refusing to fund a Gitmo closure plan is that Obama has yet to come up with any kind of concrete plan detailing exactly what he would want to do.

If he simply came up with a plan, and put the power of his charisma behind something reasonable-sounding, rather than letting Republican Senators dominate the airwaves with nightmare scenarios, I'm pretty sure he could come up with something. He could, for example, close Gitmo and move all the prisoners to an island in the Central Pacific. He could disperse the prisoners to fourteen different SuperMax prisons (or equivalents, if there are not that many). He could challenge the people of Nebraska to stand up and accept _one_ prisoner being sent to their state.

It really is pathetic to see what is essentially a cowardly position not even go challenged. There are less than 50 "high-value" detainees at Gitmo. That makes at most one per state, right? And if chickenshit Red States don't want them, then they do get the corresponding federal funding.

Look, this could be done, if Obama were not such a reed in the wind himself. FDR and LBJ would never have let themselves be bullied by a 40-Senator minority caucus the way Obama is letting himself be bullied.

"do not get the corresponding Federal funding"

But what's a "not" between friends, eh?

It really isn't good news. Don't be deceived by the second derivative. A function can have a negative second derivative and still increase indefinitely.

It would have been quite something if the rate of job loss had continued! But we are seeing an unemployment rate that we hadn't seen since the early 80s, right? What makes me even more concerned is that the economy seems to have lost its grip on the "fundamentals".

"Anti-Catholicsm is the anti-Semitism of the liberals."

I take it you've never been to Boston. It is one of the most liberal cities in the US, and one of the most Catholic.

To his credit, IMO, Obama is trying by his appointments to defuse the acrimonious "culture wars." I hope he succeeds, but he is up against deeply intrenched hatred that is more fanatical than open to resolution for the sake of the common good.

I'm really tired of hearing from people how other people hate them, and that they are just innocent victims of hatred.

For whatever it is worth, I considered myself very much a liberal politically until it became a lobby for political correctness.

-- rschmeec

Aren't you trying to impose your own version of "political correctness"? You revile people who don't agree with your political opinions, and call liberals "anti-Catholics" and "full of hatred".

My family background is Catholic, though I have left the Church. My problems with the Church are a combination of dogmatic and also with a revulsion at their hierarchy. Had my parents sent me to a Catholic school instead of a public school in the aforementioned city of Boston while I was growing up, I could have easily become a statistic.

I hope I'm not being too elliptical here.

Spurred on by this article, I looked around a bit to try to find out what the Church position is on tubal ligation. Apparently, they think it is wrong. This is simply not an opinion I can fathom, and I can assure you that it is considered extreme by most American Catholics, who tend to approve of certain forms of birth control in certain situations, no matter what they tell their priests.

I read through a Catholic bboard where a husband whose wife had been told by a doctor that it would be medically dangerous for her to become pregnant again had been considering tubal ligation. The husband was tremendously troubled by this advice, since it went against dogma. He wanted her to stay fertile, even though another pregnancy would have been dangerous to her. I simply cannot fathom the mindset that views the health of the mother as something that is of no concern whatsoever when questions of birth control are considered. (And don't get me started on abortion here...)

At this point, most American Catholics would not tell this woman she was committing a sin if she had tubal ligation. Indeed, even her own priest approved of this step.

And yet, some people insist that a positive approach to birth control is anti-Catholic, and accuse people who disagree with this of irrational hatred.

Just who hates whom here?

(FWIW, my mother had her tubes tied before her 30th birthday, as she already had five children. And she's been Catholic her entire life.)