Is it always the case that nations are sacred, and once established (by whatever means) they should be held together by any available means?

I ask this because it is also pertinent to the situation in Iraq. The "country" of Iraq was created by the British for their own convenience after the end of World War One. They just drew a line around some territory they claimed under the Sykes-Pichot agreement, installed a puppet king, and called it a country. It has been held together ever since at gunpoint, first by the puppet king with British backing, and later by a series of totalitarian regimes ending with Saddam's.

Please explain why people who were treated this way should feel any allegiance to "their country". Please also give some justification (other than the fact that we have more guns) for making them continue to live together.

I don't favor killing anybody.

I do think we should do something to control our numbers, particularly since it looks like the cheap easy energy sources that allow us to sustain them seem to be running out. Many of us will perish if we run out of oil before we find practical replacements.

"Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, there are 300,000 people surrounding the White House! They've been there for a month!"

"Good. That's the kind of situation we've had our troops training for in Iraq"

... they could put no money down, get a house, and have $50,000 left over for spending money.

When he used the word "newspeak" in his novel 1984, people thought it meant "a new way of speaking". Perhaps it was just a contraction of "news speak".

Tell the voters you're going to "do something", but select people who are pretty much guaranteed to avoid upsetting Wall Street's happy greed party.

If I were a leader of Al-Qaida, with ANY insight into the way American politics works, I would be waiting for the inevitable Democrat victory before striking again, thus revitalizing the neocon political machine...

I disagree. I'd attack just before the general election to try to get Bush's-third-term-McCain elected.

ISTR that Petraeus recently said we HAD TO reduce troop strength because the troops are stretched too thin. Now he is saying that we don't dare give the troops a break. He appears to be in a predicament that has no good solution.

There isn't any good news in the economy, and McCain cannot identify a single Republican economic policy that has produced any tangible benefit for most voters. The best he can do is try desperately to talk about anything else, except possibly the war in Iraq.

We need more dogmatic adherence to free markets, free trading, tax cuts and less of anything that involves the government.

However, it will still be the government's responsibility to bail the rich folks out with taxpayer money when their schemes go sour.

Un/underemployment? Tax cut, more spending

Recession? Tax cut, more spending

Inflation? Tax cut, more spending

Trade deficit? Tax cut, more spending

Oil prices surging? Tax cut, more spending

Instability in capital markets? Tax cut, more spending

Credit crunch? Tax cut, more spending

Perhaps closer to the truth

Could you please try to put a little more variation in your comments? Seeing the same thing over and over again had me wondering if there was something wrong with Salon's webserver that caused it to display the same page of comments no matter what I clicked.

... Do you want ALL you rights GONE for the rest of your lives???? ...

A common fallacy among reich-wingers is that only the other side will be made to suffer when this happens. They don't think about how easy it is to fall out of favor and become victims themselves.

We have to look at why people are SOO dependent on credit, though.

I'll offer a guess: We have a culture that places great value on material things and measures people by the things that they own. People would rather go into debt than be looked down upon by their neighbors for not having enough flashy stuff. The credit card offers quick and easy relief from feelings of inadequacy.

Add in the fact that incomes have not kept up with increases in the cost of living and you get a complete answer. It might not be not the only answer, but I think it's a correct one.

Falwell, Robertson, and Wright

Excellent company for Obama!

Too bad McCain's already got two of them for himself.

People in the God business say "You'll do 'X' if you love God".

Reich-wingers say "You'll do 'X' if you love America".

In both cases, the speakers are attempting to perpetrate fallacies. They want to bully you into accepting their conclusions without examining the logic of their statements. The "if you love" connection is never proven or supported by rational argument. You're just supposed to accept the speakers' naked assertions as if they were facts.

Manipulation 101

And the most amazing part of all of it is that the conventional wisdom holds -- and the establishment press even believes -- that they are the "liberal media," ...

They're called "liberal" because they sometimes screw up and tell the truth. "Conservative media" are more careful to avoid such mistakes.

The Standard & Poor's 500-stock index, the basis for about half of the $1 trillion invested in U.S. index funds, finished at 1352.99 on Tuesday, below the 1362.80 it hit in April 1999.

This only looks like a lack of progress. In fact, it's a considerable decline because the dollar has lost a lot of value since 1999.