I'm elitist for stating what should be obvious?

Living and working on snowy bear-mountains is a choice, no? This is sort of like choosing to live in Phoenix and saying that you need air conditioning because it is so damn hot. Nobody NEEDS to live in a sun-baked desert.

If you choose to live in grizzly bear-infested mountains where it snows, then by extension, you make a whole set of secondary choices. Some of these choices we make collectively and seem like good ideas at the time. If we all decide that we’re entitled to live in single-family homes on half an acre of land each in snowy bear-mountains and, in doing so create large personal “footprints” that we want to traverse in going to and from work or wherever else we want to go, we will either have to do a hell of a lot of walking or we will drive our personal cars/SUVs (because mass transit makes less sense in relatively sparsely populated areas like suburbs and exurbs, and snowy bear-mountains than it does in, say, Brooklyn). We don’t really want to walk around there on account of all the bears, anyway. When energy is cheap, the costs of this lifestyle are negligible. Energy has been so cheap for so long that most of our society has simply come to take it for granted and we have begun to regard the lifestyles that cheap energy allows as a sort of birthright. As energy costs go up, this will become decreasingly attractive to most people. Note recent trends of people leaving homes in the ‘burbs and going back to the cities.

Bears are plotting a takeover! They're already shitting in the woods! Now, I will admit to an affinity for cougars, but that's getting off on a whole different tangent...

Bottom line: Increased energy costs are going to dramatically change our lifestyle choices. The RV dealers will be among the first to go. Airlines might well be next. A near-term problem, of course, is we have built ourselves an infrastucture that in most cases assumes cheap energy/fuels - a collective choic, of sorts.

Meanwhile, I hear that the bus factories are hiring.

True enough, but this is exactly how the Republicans will sell the idea to the public - start drilling and watch the prices come down, then you can all go back to your gas-guzzling ways (aka birthrights). No shortage of morons out there.

Don't vote for anybody whose life story isn't identical to your own.

The only huge movement going on here seems to involve your bowels.

RE "The fact that she said according to Obama about America "These are not my people".

If you're representative of the Average American, then I completely understand his mom's sentiments.

All you Operation Chaos people know that the primaries are over, right??? You can go home now. It's over.

Some of these posts look like they took a fair amount of time to write - lots of detail as to why you won't vote for Obama. Almost as if the posters are being paid to spend all day writing anti-Obama screeds. I'd almost be willing to bet that most never intended to vote for Hillary either had she won the nomination. Why else would so much effort go into flogging a dead horse?

You're not fooling anybody, but it is fun to read the really pissy-sounding posts.

Does anybody else get a sense that the McCain campaign is just dripping with desperation?

Just wait, if you get your way, Obama will:

*disarm America to the extent of making us vunerable and/or appear so to ME terrorits and others.

He won't need to, Bush beat him to it.

*not let you eat what you want to because we need to be more frugile to please other countries (pretend we are not innovative or entreprenureal so we can blend in with the 3rd world countries and get their approval)

Who the hell ever said this? This is just insane. After years of Republican rule, we are well on our way to being 3rd-world, though.

*take a large percentage of your pay in the Global Poverty Tax so we can prop up other countries.

Like Israel?

*goes back on promises to take public campaign financing which is a tool to help prevent corruption in campaign financing

So what?

*Michelle O says Americans don't want much (so if you elect Obama you will not be getting much -- in him or in benefits)

*Michelle O says we have to give up a large piece of our pie and Obama says rich people don't need all that money (sounds like a communist belief of redistribution of wealth).

The Republicans are all about wealth redistribution. They have very effectively channelled money from the average citizen and concentrated it in the hands of the already-wealthy. Welcome to neo-feudalism.

"BTW, Laura Ingram, Greta VanSustern and a few others have their own shows and they are very wise and fair!"

More comedy gold!

Who the fuck do you think you're kidding? You're wasting your time here. Go post some drivel on right-wing sites where people are stupid enough to take you seriously.

I wouldn't get too alarmed at the tone of some of these posts. Salon is a favorite target of Republican staffers and volunteers who are tasked with posting anti-Obama rhetoric on discussion boards. They pose as Democrats and Hillary supporters in an attempt to manufacture some sort of validity.