I come home from "work" - you know, that mysterious place where right-wingers go every Monday morning - to find that this thread proliferateth, like unto a green bay tree.

"That's true. A lot of those jerks, however, were convinced they just HAD to spread those rumors about Palin's baby and daughter's baby because it was what they picked up from Alaska, and they think Republicans are all about spreading bad rumors to win.."

I know that it's hokey for the vice-president of the United States to spend the first ten minutes of her opening speech talking about her kids, but this was the only way of convincing the moonbattariat that she hadn't really fed them all to wolves to fatten them up for the kill.

"How long are you going to be angry about 1991, by the way? I was 7, then. "

Aha, a young whippersnapper! My point was that every single anti-woman barb you heard leveled against Palin this past week was an anti-black joke - and I'm talking about the foulest KKK-barbecue big dick gags - back then. And made by exactly the same type of people we heard from this week. Apparently political gain trumps equal rights when the Correct Folk need it.

"The same problem exists with cable, as well (as unimportant as that is to bring it up). Also, with energy: the Southern company in the southeast is pretty much the ONLY company providing electricity and natural gas to all the homes. Ticketmaster is the ONLY ticket provider of concerts "

Rank-and-file Republicans hate this phenomenon as much as anyone else does. We're for open competition, not Ticketmaster and Pfizer buying monopoly privileges from Congress. The more powerful and central governments become, the more easily this can happen.

"Out of curiosity, how do you feel about school vouchers?"

I think it's a great idea. My state is a charter state, which contracts out its educational services to competing private companies, and just as importantly has a state income tax credit for private schools, which in effect means that any taxpayer can designate a portion of his state tax to an accredited school of his choice. The competition has improved the quality of our public schools as well as making private schooling accessible to the poor.

"Sounds like a very Libertarian-centered concern, though. I've heard that those littler airlines are needed for small towns, but *shrugs* I don't know."

In fact, my own sentiments are much more libertarian than they are mainstream Republican. I was an actual registered Libertarian until Sept. 11, when the party lapsed into paranoid weirdness on foreign policy and became, so far as I can tell, a wholly owned subsidiary of al Qaeda. Except for his batty comments on the Federal Reserve, I liked what Ron Paul had to say on domestic policy.

"Oh, I don't know about that. What do you have to say about Roosevelt's internment of the Japanese? You don't think they were entitled to their rights?"

You can blame racism on both sides for that one. Japanese-Americans of the time had a totally insular culture. Unlike German and Italian immigrants, they kept so tightly to themselves that when war broke out they were easy targets for those who accused them of being spies. Given this atmosphere, Roosevelt viewed his camps as being protective custody and believed that large numbers of them would be killed by locals if they were left in close contact with, especially, the people of the San Joaquin Valley. I don't know whether you have ever seen the museum at Manzanar, but you would have to know San Joaquin culture and history to understand the pressures of the time.

Impaled wolves, sex with moose. Okay, Salon has finally lost it. Flown up its own capacious asshole.

@Rupert_c

"Lyndon LaRouche bought Salon.

That would explain everything."

If that were true, the conspiracy theory columns would have more stuff about British royalty. I think it was actually bought by Tom Cruise. How else would you explain the total lack of attention paid to the huge censorship story of the week, in which the Church of Scientology sent four thousand DMCA takedown notices - four thousand - to website operators?

@Mantonat

"Salon, you should be ashamed. Please return to the days when you were respectable and respected."

Remember when the left had writers like Jack London and John Steinbeck?

"She could well turn out to be one of the great forces of the 21st century, a combination of Golda Meir, Indira Ghandi and Margaret Thatcher."

Yes, but some of us in the Evil Party are questioning her choice of John McCain as a running mate. I was pulling for either Ann Coulter or Larry Elder.

"Mccains' father conspired with LBJ on June 7th, t967 to let the Nazi Israeli air

force sink the USS Liberty. Admiral Mccain recalled fighter jets that were

scrambled to answer an SOS from the USS Liberty."

I knew one of you Taliban-slurpers was eventually going to blame Ze Choose for the Republican ticket.

with this passage: "Now that's the Sarah Palin brand of can-do, no-excuses, moose-hunting feminism -- a world away from the whining, sniping, wearily ironic mode of the establishment feminism represented by Gloria Steinem, a Hillary Clinton supporter whose shameless Democratic partisanship over the past four decades has severely limited American feminism and not allowed it to become the big tent it can and should be. "

This is why Paglia is the one Salon columnist I really respect.

@nkennedy

" The death penalty is a barbaric relic of a vengeful, lex talionis past that teaches 'might makes right'"

And as such, is the only appropriate punishment for certain cases of ultimate inhumanity. If I haven't convinced you, I dare you to read up on the name "Skylar Deleon" and tell me you're still anti death penalty.