"We call that theft."

Yea. It's a good thing we don't have such a system here, where the rich and powerful don't steal.

Damn guy, have you been asleep since junior high? Wall Street barons have just trashed our financial system by playing roulette with other people's money (oh, but that is not theft, I guess), and to rub salt in the wound their pals in government just handed them $1 Trillion of our money to make the theft stick. That's not theft? And all that after they waged a 2 year campaign (fortunately unsuccessful--for now) to get their greedy, grubby, fat fingers on our Social Security, so that they could steal from that too.

Meanwhile, half of your income tax is going to National Security and Defense, to make the world safer for Exxon, Wal-Mart, &Co. to exploit. But they get to pocket the profits. To you that's not theft either, I guess. This is a country that socializes risk but privatizes profit. They call it "The Free Market." It's a great scam if you're in on the profit side of things. But to me, that is theft.

"As I've gotten older, watched people work, and interacted with the World, I've seen nothing that changes that dynamic."

You've not looked. There are countries that make socialism work quite successfully. Sweden has been socialist since the Great Depression. They have universal health care. They have 0% illiteracy. The gap between rich and poor is much smaller. Their standard of living is as high or higher than ours. They have no one living in cardboard boxes in the street. But you chose to ignore that experience. It doesn't match your ideology.

The problem for the GOP is that their true constituency is the wealthy elite, a very small and exclusive group (Dubya's "haves and have mores"). They therefore must make up numbers by courting voters too distracted or uninformed to realize that the GOP does not serve them. They've done this in the past by stoking religious, racial and xenophobic fears, and by vigorous disenfranchisement efforts targeting the minorities they revile. Naturally this doesn't play well with these minorities.

How can the GOP change this? I really can't see a way out for them. They've boxed themselves in. They've painted themselves into a corner. They've gone down a dead end. Phhht! Bye Bye GOP!

The problem now is how to make the Democrats do our biding. They seem rather intent on becoming the new GOP.

If this isn't Willy Pete I don't know what is:

http://www.independent.co.uk/multimedia/archive/00110/Thursday_-_Gaza_110942a.jpg

This picture is from a photo montage of last-week's news on the Independent, which can be found here: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/the-past-seven-days-in-photographs-806086.html?ino=7. Compare the 2 airbursts of WP shells in the Reuters picture above with the picture accompanying the Wikipedia article on white phosphorous.

Let me ask you something. You witness a crime; a mugging, child abuse, whatever. Must you first come up with an alternate plan for the perpetrator before you intervene? (Like "Hey, dude, before you mug that guy, I've lined you up with a job interview, so you'll have money so you won't need to do this!") Of course not.

The same applies here. One does not have to present an alternative course of action before one decries war crimes. What Israel should have done differently is neither here nor there to whether they are violating international law, the laws of war, or the Geneva Convention.

But if you insist on a discussion on what Israel should have done, most of the world (with the exception of the US, Australia, and Israel) already have a plan: Israel should stop occupying Palestinian territory and fall back to the 1967 borders. Just because you don't like this plan doesn't mean those who support it don't have one.

"Purpose in life." Ha! There is none. This realization is both frightening and liberating. I didn't pick just any god, though. I looked at Zen Buddhism (no god!) and while I haven't fully embraced it, it's been very helpful.

Great column.

...aren't going to cut off a Queen and tell her to shut-up. Her presence there was key to the tone and direction of the discussion. So I don't know whether this is a trend or not.

Nonetheless I was shocked at how good and substantive the debate was.

"I think it's the Republican Party's mission, for the next four years, to expose at every turn what Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid want to do to this country."

Good. That is the job of an opposition party. My big beef with Democrats is that they utterly failed in this.

That said, I think it's laughable that Republicans continue to insist that Democrats are the party of "limiting your freedoms, bigger government" and that they themselves stand for "personal responsibility, liberty, and freedom." Really now. How can he say this line with a straight face? This from someone who wishes to lead the party that has ballooned the national debt, presided over the biggest economic meltdown since the Great Depression, spied on US citizens without warrants, detained US citizens indefinitely without trials, tortured, and finally, evaded personal responsibility whenever and wherever they could (Lewis Libby, telecom immunity, "look to the future, not to the past"--i.e. don't prosecute Bush Admin officials for their numerous crimes, and on and on.)