"what else besides abject stupidity can explain this?"

How about blatant dishonesty?

I wish these clowns would read some history and learn how Hitler came to power. Then maybe they'd understand why some of us are worried about Bush.

"It's hard to imagine a more cynical political strategy than trying to hold hostage funding for our troops in combat and our wounded warriors in order to extract $11 billion in additional social spending,"

How about a president who holds his own troops hostage in Iraq and demands funding in the name of "supporting the troops"?

"As we have learned repeatedly over the last six years, those who tell the truth and have done nothing wrong want investigations; guilty parties want to avoid them. If Col. Boylan is telling the truth, one would think he'd be eager to have an investigation -- governmental or media -- to find out what actually happened. Yet he has done nothing to initiate one and everything possible to ensure it does not happen. Why would that be?"

What is particularly interesting is that this attitude is found in someone whose commander-in-chief says that people who object to warrantless wiretapping must have something to hide.

I suspect that Bush has secretly pardoned the Enron culprits and put them to work on the federal budget.

What happened to "If we build it, they will come"?

I'm having trouble figuring out why Muslim clerics keep saying that womens' dress can be problematic for men, but they never seem to say that mens' dress might be problematic for women.

Can anyone explain this?

... but I can't get over the feeling that this "opposition" is nothing but a dog-and-pony show that is intended to deceive us into thinking the Democrats might be good for something.

I'd love to see the Democrats grow some backbone, but this is hardly a useful situation to do it in. If Mukasey isn't confirmed, Bush can just use a recess appointment to stick us with some dirtbag of his own choice, or do nothing and leave the current interim dirtbag at DOJ's helm. I don't think either is obviously preferable to Mukasey, so I have to assume this "opposition" is just show that will amount to nothing.

... and I also think we should NOT start drilling in the Alaskan preserve just to keep the price of oil down. There isn't that much oil there, and I think we should save it until we *really* need it.

"Wires have a way of snapping and zapping after a strong quake, or even a fire storm for that matter."

Underground wires don't do very well in earthquakes, either, and they're a heckuva lot more difficult to repair. A two hour bucket truck job becomes an all day backhoe job when the wires are buried, and that's assuming you know where the damage is.

Lineman is a physically demanding job. What happens to linemen when they start to get old? Do they have a shot at moving into management positions, or do their employers just dump them and replace them with younger people? What kind of jobs can linemen get after they're too old to be linemen anymore?

I don't know the answers to these questions, but the lack of people seeking lineman careers suggests that the answers are not pretty. I sure as heck wouldn't want a job that left me unemployed with no useful skills long before I was ready to retire.

40 senators voted against confirmation, but it would only have taken 16 to petition for a vote to invoke cloture. By my reckoning, that means at least 25 of those "nay" votes were from senators who really wanted to confirm but who didn't want to go on record as voting for confirmation.

Supposedly, wealthy people need tax breaks to encourage them to invest. I never believed this load of hogwash.

What else are they going to do with their money? Stuff it in the mattress? Spend it with reckless abandon? Give it all away? Build Scrooge McDuck style money bins and go swimming in them?

"Because you're disagreeing with yourself."

Please explain the logic you used to reach this conclusion.

That's OK, I probably could have done a better job of expressing my own opinion.

All I was trying to say was that I thought wealthy people would invest even without special tax breaks because there really isn't much else they can do with that much money. They could spend it or give it away, but these would probably stimulate the economy anyway. Even just putting it in the bank would do the trick, because the bank would invest the money itself.

Heck, even stuffing the money in mattresses might at least help by propping up the dollar because it would effectively take the money out of circulation.

"The context of the Shakespeare quote is in the planning to start a revolution--it has to do with eliminating the lawyers so as to ease the path to overthrowing the government."

I beg to differ. Dick The Butcher uttered that during a comic relief segment in King Henry VI. It was one of the things he said he would to to make life better if he became king. It had nothing to do with the means by which he might overthrow the existing king.

ISTR that the U.S. telecom industry made a pitch to the government back in the 1990's: They claimed they needed tax breaks to finance a new fiber-to-the-home infrastructure that would support 45 megabit residential service.

They got tax breaks that ultimately totaled $200 billion, and we got 1 megabit DSL over ancient copper wires. The telecoms are rolling in money, and the U.S. has fallen to 15th place in broadband penetration.

Now the telecoms are finally working on fiber-to-the-home, but this is a new effort for which we're going to pay again, this time by giving the telecoms absolute control over how those connections may be used.

What did we get for $200 billion in tax incentives? Nothing.