Wingnut's problem on this one is that in the US we don't actually have "capitalist" (as in open-market) medicine to compare any of these hypothetical socialized medical plans to. We have a coven of medieval guilds whose response to introducing any sort of actual competition is to pour boiling oil on the heads of the peasants from the parapets of their palaces. Small wonder that the public is screaming for single-payer. How could dealing with one big insurance company possibly be worse than dealing with the one-of-many, non-competing insurance company that we are currently forced to use because it's the one our employer picked for us?

Ye earls and viscounts of the medical system: bend over, because Cromwell is about to make you part of Medicare For Everybody by popular demand. Let's at least allow private medicine to coexist in parallel with the public system, as in the UK. Perhaps the remaining private doctors and hospitals will actually adopt the free market as an alternative.

"Noam has never had anything good to say about the US and never will. If he could be balanced once in a while I might take him more seriously. As long as the world has gone round one people have crapped on another people."

In particular, the first European settlers in Arizona walked in on a land war raging between the adventuring, invading Navajo and the agrarian Hopi. In the 1750s the Hopi appealed to Arizona's ruler, Spain, for help in fighting off the Navajo. The military torch was lassed to Mexico and then to the US, eventually becoming an American court fight that was finally resolved in 1974.

Don't forget your PC rules, folks: all peoples of the world have free right of migration and settlement except for those of European ancestry.

"I seem to recall that the anti-nuclear "jihad" was mostly organized and funded by the fossil fuels industry."

I seem to recall that the antinuke jihad stemmed from the belief on the left that everything science produces is mortally dangerous. Those were the days when liberals were certain that Bonnie Raitt was on the shortlist for the Nobel Physics Prize.

"2) while we know how to build nuclear plants, we don't know how to deal with the waste nor how to deal with the aftermath of breakdowns like TMI"

Do you feel like accusing this great thinker of being a fossil fuel lobbyist?

"I never said that ALL anti-nuclear activity was the result of fossil fuels industry manipulation. "

And I'm sure that fossil lobbyists liked having the antinuclear sentiment around, especially to deflect media attention from the fact that burning coal releases far more radioactive emissions than any nuclear plant would be allowed (permission to do so is grandfathered into the law). But fundamentally, being antinuclear is a scriptural given on the left. We will just have to route our way around these old bastards until they die off. It's a lot like arguing with creationists.

Windows XP had a file Search function you could activate by right-clicking any folder or entire disk. A handy little dialog came up that allowed you to find a specific file, or all .DOC files, or all files in a given range of size or creation date.

In Vista, this function was replaced by a "search box" that will always instantaneously return a Not Found for any requested file specifier, meaning that it hasn't even tried. This is another reason why I suspect that Vista was secretly designed by Apple.

"...rescues are free if they occur on park service land- as I believe they are nationwide. "

Yessirree, it's a little-known fact that if you lunch it on Park Service terrain, helicopters and rescue teams will spontaneously materialize to bear you to the Emerald City Medical Center, which nobody has to pay for. The author of this piece may have turned Libertarian up on the peaks, but many of the readers seem to be alumni of the Harry Reid Institute of Physics and Economics.

...but Sotomayor is going to have to come up with a believable explanation of that weird New Haven decision if she expects to get confirmed. Part of the controversy is that at the time of the decision she failed to 'show her work'.

Should be be using 'gay' and 'Mecca' in the same expression? Wouldn't gays tend to get beheaded if they go there?

"Christ, he's been around since Nixon.1, writing for Agnew, I believe. When can we see the last of Pat? Why does MSNBC keep him around? He makes ridiculously stupid statements, quotes specious articles like the Rosen piece, and does it all over the cable TV universe. There must be someone on the right that makes a little sense. Buchanan is so tired. I don't see why Matthews still likes him. A foil, I guess."

"If you want to see a truly viscous satire..."

Yes, sometimes I have seen humor that is difficult to pour out of its container.

" I do believe it wrong, and that it will not benefit society. I also believe it will lead, directly and quickly, to the legalization of polygamy, and of incestuous marriage; once you get rid of "one man, one woman", you are pretty much saying "anybody, anywhere, under any circumstances"."

So why should governments, of all institutions, have any say in who gets married? Marital customs are ancestrally bound to cultures and religions. Your church has its set of moral standards; let the gays have theirs and the polygamists have their own. The capitalist way is to let all these moral systems compete freely. Civilization is what emerges from this competition in the long run.