"The reason that I don't support the death penalty has more to do with the inequitable way that it is carried out than anything else."

So what we need, then, is a federal program to get more white people to commit execution-worthy crimes. I know - "Mother Kaczynski's Organic Cocoa Puffs With Meth", on sale now at Whole Foods!

"The tyrants that sorely need to be overthrown are living right there among them...

YES! Supported by your government"

I fully agree that our attempt, undoubtedly at the behest of State Department strategists, to maintain an alliance with the Saudi royal family after 9/11 was a mistake. The cultural poison that led to the terrorist war against the West from 1970 to 2001 emanated from the cult interpretation of Islam by the Wahhabi sect in that country, funded by Saudi princes to be spread across the region. Had we simply smashed the place flat after 9/11 to demonstrate our umbrage and then hanged the Wahhabi leaders in the streets as we did the Nazis a generation before, the region might already be on the mend by now.

As things stand now, the only fix for the Middle East is going to be a few centuries of colonial rule by some civilized nation. The US is not designed for that sort of thing, and Europe no longer has the stomach for it, so I hereby nominate the Chinese.

Since Obama's race has not changed in the last year, his fall in the polls cannot be about ethnicity. It's about leadership. Last November, Democrat rank-and-filers were expecting another Roosevelt. He could have inspired the nation with an energy independence Apollo program. Instead, the best that can be said is that he still beats Jimmy Carter.

"GMO, big food, indigenous cultures, chemicals, pesitcides, dirka dirka I am liberal hear me roar....."

LIke the "Discovery Institute", these people are a fundamentalist church masquerading as science. The Green Revolution is innately sustainable, because after all it's farming. Population growth in the developing world is not sustainable, but it never stays that way. Historically, every last-growing population that industrializes has seen its population growth slow down toward zero. We are now starting to see that happen in China.

"it's just that, you know, Serena Williams is an Amazonian, threatening, no-class angry black woman who needs to learn some humility -- I can't help thinking it even more. I mean, do you hear yourselves, fellow white people?"

Sure, give Serena a mulligan, or whatever they call those in tennis, for her behavior. You wouldn't want to subject the poor dear to the same week-long torrent of abuse that a white Congressman might get for calling the President a liar.

Wish I could afford one of these. But wait - because this is electronics, and not medicine, by this time next year I will be able to get one cheap.

One word, buddy: fluoxetine. Now available generically, and cheap at Walmart.

" Obama's support has fallen much more among conservative Democrats than liberal Democrats, 12 points to 6 points"

My town in northern AZ is a case in point. We are a mixture of artists and New Agers (majority boomer Democrat, minority small business Republican) and retired. In the retiree population both parties number about equal, with the Democrats being rich old New Dealers who last November were pulling for Obama to go bold on building Rooseveltian infrastructure programs. His el foldo to the Luddite lobby on energy programs really hurt him with these older Democrats. In this climate they live practically forever, and they keep on voting.

Be a Mac user, but know how to fix spam-crammed, virus-blown, misconfigured Windows PCs.

My take on why the Internet has been the most successful and widely-accepted new technology in the last thirty years: because it has no single point of vulnerability, the Luddites and their lawyers can't touch it.

" while growing up in working class inner-city neighborhoods, but they all know the names of the popular video games and websites. The time you spend playing with the new technologies is time you cannot devote to art, music, literature, foreign language, or mathematics "

Before those evil video games and websites existed, those same kids were experts on spectator sports. But most importantly, time on computers CAN BE time devoted to all those cultural pursuits. Technology is not pushing aside culture, but making it accessible to more people than ever before.

"ebooks are convenient for searching text and skimming but I don't think I'd want to read Hegel's "Phenomenology" on a Kindle"

After acquiring an iPhone recently, one of the unexpected benefits has been being able to read ebooks on it. The Kindle app gives me access to Amazon's entire Kindle library without having to buy another special purpose device, while the Stanza app lets me read all the other ebook formats out there, including the entire public domain Project Gutenberg library. I find that if I select Verdana as a display font, I can read whole paperback pages at a time, clearly even with my marginal retiree vision. And because my eyes are moving less than when I read paper, my visual 'floater' problem disappears for ebooks.

I'm finding the reading experience to be better than any book I would read sequentially (straight through). Paper still beats the iPhone for illustrations and reference works, but wait till next year. And the convenience factor! When I get stuck in line at the post office, I can whip out my iPhone and read a little Kipling or Pepys. Instead of having to plan strategic stashes of printed books in the car for when I might have to wait for something, my iPhone acts as the literary equivalent of a Netflix queue. I have actually started looking forward to bureaucratic encounters.