...the most notorious conspiracy theory ever was the one where the Jews were an alien race of vermin seeking to pollute the Aryan race, somehow controlled all the money in the world, and sold out Germany to the Allies in WWI. There wasn't a lick of truth to any of it, yet millions of people were gassed because of it. This is why it is good to be particular about establishing what is truth and what is not.

People who are unhappy with the established system tend to fall into conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories are a great way to establish doubt about the system, a necessary prelude to establishing your own system. Certainly that's why the Nazis believed and promoted their race theories, why Joe McCarthy waved his blank sheet of paper supposedly naming commies in the State Department, and why lefties are always going on about CIA conspiracies and the JFK assassination and whatnot. The intention is to sow doubt.

I don't believe that any lie about George Bush is good as as long as it hurts him. If we want to live in a sane and liberal society, then we need to adhere strictly to the truth, as best as we can determine what it is. And the best truth we know is that the 2 towers and WTC 7 fell because of fire and structural weakness, not from demolitions. The other stuff about the Pentagon and Flight 93 is really too ridiculous to even argue against.

...that there's an huge untapped market of non voters out there and Republicans seem to be much smarter than Democrats about tapping into it. At least 50 percent of the country doesn't vote. That can turn any election.

This is probably how Republicans won in Ohio in 2004; they flushed anti-gay marriage voters out of the woodwork (voters normally too dumb to know what day election day is) and pointed them to the voting booths and this gave the Republicans their slim victory in Ohio.

It's possible they even managed to make a late effort on election day which not only won Ohio for them, but skewed the early morning exit polls.

Communications can be so quick these days that determined poll workers may very well be able to change the outcome of an election in the afternoon from what it might have otherwise been in the morning.

One way Republicans might have brought out their voters is through their connections to church groups. (This would be a hard market for Demcrats to crack, though.)

Democrats need to find out how to mine their own untapped voters. They also need to learn how not to quit on election day. The fact that leaked exit polls seemed to promise a Kerry victory might well have been what doomed Kerry, since Democrats might have relaxed thier efforts while Republicans redoubled theirs.

To draw the US into the quagmire of the ME, that's why.

Bin Laden figures he cut down the USSR to size in Afghanistan and he wants to do the same to the US in Iraq and Afghanistan. And he might end up being right.

From bin Laden's POV, all the attacks under Clinton were failures and the one on 9/11 was a resounding success. That's why he popped up so obligingly to help Bush before the election (in golden robes, no less). This is also probably why there hasn't been another terrorist attack on US soil; because it would hurt Bush and would be redundant.

The US government isn't in Iraq because it's supersmart and superevil; it's in Iraq because under Bush and Cheney it's superstupid.

...is that George Bush is an ass. And if Bill Clinton's Defense Secretary tells George Bush to do something, than George Bush probably isn't going to do it. The man doesn't even listen to his own father, because his father isn't named Rove, Cheney, or Rumsfeld.

Maybe that's why Perry said it--so that he WOULDN'T do it.

Yes, I'm kind of serious. If it turns out I'm right, I'll be shocked but not floored.

...the kind of artist whose real medium is bureaucracy. Instead of wielding a brush, she wields the power of grant applications. The themes she talks about tend to make more sense on grant applications than they do in real life.

Science is supposed to be about experiment and discovery, but she seems to be only interested in using science to create polemics against the corporate culture (the same corporate culture that happens to reward her lavishly with grant money and access to museums).

The typical bureaucratic justification for art grants is that art is supposed to improve the minds of the public. Hence the great stress she puts on all the things her art is supposedly conveying to the public. However, art is in fact a lousy medium for teaching anything, because it can be interpreted in any way one likes. If the public really needs to know about fish on antidepressants, IMO there are better and truer ways to go about it than using art to turn the issue into a comedy.