Fear over debt is also exaggerated, so while I argued in a previous post that debt is greater than commonly understood, it's not always bad to deficit spend (growing out of debt happens).

The thing is, if we are going to run up big deficits we should be spending that money on improving infrastructure, education and health care. That way, we will start "turning a profit" as a nation one day. Running deficits to wage endless wars and give tax breaks to millionaires (many who, in turn, invest it outside the US) is not going to provide the kind of returns we need.

...that the person who informed Hoekstra of the secret program his committee didn't know about is a terrorist:

"I have learned of some Intelligence Community activities about which our committee has not been briefed," said Hoekstra.

This means that Hoekstra is in communication with a terrorist! Indeed Hoekstra is in league with terrorists, given that after having Bush administration secrets revealed to him, the MI Rep. demanded a change of course - asking that his entire committee be briefed!

Enemies everywhere! Arrrrgh!!!

The GAO has fallen to the terrorists too. It's incredible how such a rag-tag group of Islamic extremists, who we can't even identify, have taken over our premier newspaper, half of Congress, 60 percent or more of the general public, and who knows how much else.

I do not deny that many Israelis feel threatened - nor do I deny that there are causes for that fear that arise from bad actors in the region. But what makes articles like this so awful is that Israel’s feeling of being threatened does not provide it unqualified justification for any and all actions, as the author seems to suggest.

Many nations and peoples have felt justifiably threatened and put upon, yet that feeling of insecurity is not a free pass to do whatever you want. The author invokes Israel's feeling of insecurity as though no other bar needs to be reached to unleash death on hundreds of innocent Lebanese children and families -- as though Israel itself doesn't make innocent Palestinians and Lebanese civilians feel pretty insecure all the time too.

Who can deny that Palestinian and Lebanese civilians have cause to feel insecure thanks to Israel's often indiscriminate reactions to discrete bands of criminals? Well over two-thousand innocent civilians have been killed by the Israeli military since the second Intifada began (certainly if you count the Lebanese). Would the author therefore condone Palestinians who take out Israeli civilians while trying to blow up a couple soldiers at, say, an Israeli pizza shop? Would that "collateral damage" while taking out "military targets" constitute "self defense?" Of course not. Justified Palestinian outrage does not justify murder, plain and simple. So why isn’t it that plain and simple when Israel is doing the killing?

(Please, those who disagree with me do not say Hezbollah started it…etc., etc., etc. I am not writing about Hezbollah, I'm writing about innocent dead Lebanese who have nothing to do with Hezbollah – innocent Lebanese who do not have the political or military power to control Hezbollah and who have been killed at 15,000 feet by Israel. You are welcome to say, "that’s the way the cookie crumbles," but then please explain how the families of innocent dead non-Israelis don’t have the right to "defend themselves" back again, around and around.)

PS: I publish as "Reality Based Liberal." I am not "Reality Based Lefty," who has an earlier post in this section (someone mixed that up earlier).

Use of the word "center": The DLC, which supports corporate welfare and war in Iraq (neither of which poll well among any set of voters), is described as the "center." Meanwhile, those to the left are "liberal." Maybe the center is somewhere other than corporate funded abstractions like the DLC. I expect more out of Salon.

"Voted to give Bush authority to war" v. voted for the war: By 2003 it was clear to any responsible senator that Bush was a lying, amoral sack, who could not be trusted. Anyone voting to give him the power to declare war knew what they were doing and any claim that they trusted him to use that power wisely is not honest.

DLC opponents are Nader voters: First, you are wrong. Many Democratic voters angry at Clinton and the DLC are actually Gore and Kerry voters. But I'll let that one slide. Even if they weren't, blaming Nader is wimpy.

Bush won in 2000 because the Supreme Court stopped a recount of Florida votes (and Katherine Harris purged many more voters than the margin of victory in one way or another). To blame American voters who picked the candidate that best represented their interests rather than the televised theft of democracy is one of the biggest chicken-shits out there. Don't you have the balls to fight the real enemy?

Ignoring the fact that political torture often is written off as "bad apples," I do have some doubts about how one would approach torture in Nebraska the same way as in Chile or Iraq.

The reason being that in Nebraska, isn't torture almost always the act of an individual? I don't deny that what some men do to women in the privacy of homes can be called torture, but unless MacKinnon in her book is talking about men in the US who act in concert with one another to torture their wives collectively (which Goldstein doesn’t explicitly state), comparisons to Pinochet are misleading and counterproductive.

(I am not saying that the acts of individuals in Nebraska do not constitute a societal pathology that requires a response as collective and organized as response to torture in Chile, only that they are not the same thing and that it is very sloppy to imply they are.)

Wysiwyg - spot on. Mission accomplished for some.