"Tell me, please, why you think an agenda of drilling, digging, and going nuclear would be "Arizona-friendly"? "

Because the number one issue in Arizona this season is unemployment. When solar cells get cheap enough to shingle our roofs with, everyone is going to be using them to mitigate our huge summer A/C bills, but solar will never be a baseload source of energy even in this state. Adding several new reactors at Palo Verde, on the other hand, would create large numbers of jobs in heavily-populated Maricopa County while making us an even bigger river of money off California's stupidity. Instead of shipping the uranium Arizona mines to France, we ought to be using it ourselves.

If you want to really clean up the state's environment, you need to can the flat-earth rhetoric and take the first steps toward electric commuter cars for those millions of drivers in metro Phoenix and Tucson. Having been here thirty years, most of that time in Phoenix, I fondly remember clean air.

Oh, and there's a reason I said "Goldwater country", not "Bush country." Expanding government beyond the orbit of Jupiter was not Goldwater's interpretation of Republican policy.

"Whoever wins, America is finished and they will probably represent the last Presidential election that anyone cares about to foist any sort of governance upon us. "

I'm old enough to have seen exactly this argument used in 1956, when all "thinking" Americans were lectured to by the professariat on how crucial it was that we elect Adlai Stevenson. Everyone knew that if Eisenhower were re-elected, it would prove that Americans rejected poetry in favor of TV and Elvis.

"Americans are idiots who vote for idiots. I recommend McCain/Palin for you dimwits, because they will amuse me the most and you deserve to suffer some more; you clearly have not learned your lesson yet."

And this is precisely why, even as our European moral superiors sink into dhimmitude, we continue to survive.

Congratulations! For Salonistas, that's quite a transformation.

@Elephantman

"McCain looks like a President already. He's going back to Washington, to lead. He's pulled the "economy" rug out from under Obama. Pelosi and Reid and Barney Frank will never let Obama hold the reins in Congress."

So far, neither candidate has looked good on the economic meltdown issue. McCain just blustered about firing the head of the NYSE and the urgent need to regulate everything in sight. Obama had a platinum-plated opportunity to step in to the role of Franklin Roosevelt, but that would mean getting today's post-hippie luddite Democrats behind massive technology development, so he's chickened out.

Let's see if McCain can do better in Washington.

@Steveinmidtown

"This is getting stupid...you write this great piece about spreading for a ton of guys & now this? Who cares? Let's hear about your 3 ways!"

Worked for Bill Clinton, didn't it?

And in the world of ideas, the only valid concepts are those blessed by Prof. Marx in an NPR editorial. Palin can't play in their little sandbox.

"I am a 28-year-old man who is attracted to women, especially to those in my age group"

Yes, Salon recognizes that the corrosive effects of eight years of Republican rule has caused heterosexuality to break out in certain American demographics. The sudden elevation of Sarah Palin as a heterosexual diva is, as has been noted in 11,563 thoughtful articles in this forum during the past month, an obvious symptom of a Nation In Decline (tm).

But we must recognize that heterosexuals are generally born that way. If you catch your son furtively changing the channel from Oxygen to a football game, take heart in knowing that the twenty-first century offers increasing acceptance of his kind. Although he'll have to leave your apartment in Silver Spring and will never be able to influence policy in forthcoming Democratic administrations, there are now large numbers of his kind in places like Ohio and Arizona. He will even find academic tolerance in places like this. Square your shoulders and face up to a new world.

"The misinformation about HIPAA is breathtaking -- beyond its misspellings (repeat after me: it isn't like hippo). Having spent 7 years writing software for healthcare professionals and I've learned way more than I want to about HIPAA from the counsel of both hospitals and my company."

Unfortunately, most of the misinformation about HIPAA seems to be on the part of medical personnel. They have taken to invoking HIPAA as their universal excuse for treating patients like idiot children. It's become a reason for denying the patient access to his own records, while letting miscellaneous snoops see anything they want. Although the Act is supposed to drive practitioners toward use of databases, like every other business in the 21st century, I still see that wall of paper records behind every receptionist in medicine while I scratch vainly away at yet another paper history form that makes me tell every new practitioner the same information that should already be waiting for him in my online jacket.

I've tried using my "retired IT guy card" when I see lack of technological competence in medicine. Unfortunately, I find that doctors behave like airline employees with brains. They pride themselves in knowing as little about computers as they do about investing.

You liberals actually believe that beauty and brains trade off, don't you? And, of course, that this holds only for a woman.