The article, and presumably the book, has worthwhile things to say about poverty and inequality on a global scale. But the opening fact - that more people worldwide live in cities than rural areas - has nothing to do with that. All it means is that a smaller percentage of the population is involved in food production, which is partly due to modern farming methods, and partly due to population grown (as another poster mentioned). The slum is used as a symbol of poverty, but would people be better off living in abject poverty out in the countryside? Urban poverty isn't the issue here; poverty is.

Hillary Clinton has huge name recognition, a big war chest, barely any governing experience, is a poor public speaker, and she's far to the right of her party. In other words, she's George W. Bush in 2000. The only difference is, half the country already hates her bitterly. It took Bush years of disaster after disaster to get to that point.

Plus, on general principle, I'd like to think that in a country of 300 million people, and an alleged democracy at that, more than two families would be capable of producing presidents.

I have to take issue with something gigelorum wrote a few posts down.

> 5.Nostalgia for the Clinton era. Oh yes, bring back the ass grabbing, head in the sand approach which ignored the first World Trade Center bombing, and the problems with radical Islam.

First of all, what the hell would any of this have to do with Hillary, even if it were true? As for the first WTC bombing, Bill Clinton made it a point to capture those responsible, and they were tried, convicted, and are currently in U.S. custody. Can you say the same about the second WTC bombing? After that bombing, Clinton began to realize that this wasn't an isolated incident, but part of a terror campaign by Osama bin Laden. Clinton made it his mission to capture or kill bin Laden and disrupt Al Qaeda, but with the Republicans stonewalling his every move - witness how they screamed bloody murder over Clinton's remarkably successful campaign to remove Milosovich from power - he wasn't able to do as much as he wanted.

What he did do was this: cut off all diplomatic relations with the Taliban and put them under heavy sanctions. Bush not only lifted those sanctions, he gave the Taliban foreign aid right up until 9/10/01. Clinton assigned a naval task force to take out Osama the moment we could locate him - the "Wag the Dog" incident was an attempt on bin Laden's life, which apparently missed him by less than 24 hours. As soon as Bush took office, that naval task force stood down and sailed away.

Clinton made several attempts to take down Osama, and saw doing so as a priority long before lots of folks in Washington did. Did he do enough? Obviously not. But he did more than anyone before or since. He spent 10 times more money on fighting terrorism than any predecessor. He had weekly antiterror meetings with the heads of every related agency and demanded constant updates on how the fight against terrorism was progressing. By comparison, Bush foisted antiterror meetings to Cheney, who formed a committee who met exacty... never.

Clinton didn't have the political or public support to launch an all-out war on terror, but I still maintain he did more to fight it than any president since Jefferson went to war with the Barbary Pirates. And you can be damn sure that if 9/11 had happened on his watch, he would have called in air support to defend the Pentagon and other targets, not sat in a classroom wetting his pants. And you can be damn sure he would have gone after the people who actually attacked us, not invaded the country in the Middle East with the fewest connections to Al Qaeda and ignored the real bad guys.

And what the hell any of this has to do with Hillary is anyone's guess.

> will conservatives be in the awkward position of fighting against a vaccine that could prevent cancer because it undermines their abstinence-only message?

Will they be? They already are! The religious right has already vowed to block this vaccine, and considering the FDA blocked the morning-after pill from going over-the-counter even though their advisory panel overwhelmingly approved it, there's a good chance they'll be successful.

Their rationale for letting thousands of women die needlessly every year from cervical cancer, is that allowing such a vaccine would "promote promiscuity." Now, never mind that that's absurd logic. It cuts right to the heart of what religious conservatives are after - they'd rather see you dead than sexually active.

That's what all of their attacks on contraception, on abortion, on sex ed, and now on vaccinations, are all about. In these conservatives' minds, no one has a right to have consentual sex under any but an extremely narrow circumstance - to procreate, within the confines of marriage.

Now, the only societies on Earth that treat sex as a crime - which is exactly what religious conservatives are doing - are incredibly repressive regimes like the Taliban. Is that really the direction we want this country to move in?

I don't read /. regularly, but has any male writer been criticized for his looks, ever on that site? I mean, we live in a country that puts Larry "walking cadaver" King on television every night without complaint but will only put a woman in the anchor chair if she's "perky." The only defense of Slashdot's readers is that this attitude is hardly limited to computer geeks - there are plenty of assholes everywhere.

Anyway, I didn't see the picture of Annalee that ran with that particular article, but I've been a fan of her writing for years, and based on other photos I've seen, she's fucking hot. So there.

If memory serves, Rummy did one tour in the Air Force, during peacetime. Which, apart from Bush's unfinished stint in the Guard, is the sum total of the Bush cabal's military service.