If you can't see the sexist, elitist comments on these boards about Palin, then you're clueless. Or an unenlightened male.

Is this supposed to be fighting fire with fire or something? Or are you also sexist, NYCGrrrl?

Palin has gone out of her way to present herself as a redneck with all of her moose-skinning, rifle shooting, and polar bear gnawing. She's clearly chosen this persona for herself. I see no reason to contradict her.

Pit bulls aren't nasty dogs unless you train them to be. *Ahem* far right Christianity in the boonies

Isn't this something that is, in fact, becoming rarer but more televised; in the same vein as child abduction and such? Doesn't this mean that we are doing something right? Or am I to assume that this downturn is transient?

I would not deny that school shootings are a serious problem. Personally, I avoided one in high school by a matter of hours - but this was gang violence related and pre-Columbine. In our case, the district's response was to enhance security to an extreme degree. Roving armed security guards, metal detectors, and honor students suspended over scissors all gave me and my fellow students a police state mentality. I worry about the children who begin school under these conditions and never see anything other than a pseudo-academic pseudo-police state.

I wish he really did call her a pig; it seems about right to me.

It's not like our bodies are puppets controlled by ethereal daemons; of course homosexuality is biological - so is everything else!

FIRE!!!

Good thing Bush never got through that Social Security privatization....

You should be jumping for joy. You're only 28 and the markets are crashing. A 60 year old should be suicidal.

Only if that 28 year old doesn't have parents.

no, not that one - the other one: Fascism.

I truly don't understand people calling this socialism or communism. The Bush years have been far more like the other side of extremism. For example, from Wikipedia:

Various scholars attribute different characteristics to fascism, but the following elements are usually seen as its integral parts: nationalism, militarism, totalitarianism, dictatorship, class collaboration, populism, collectivism, statism, social interventionism, and economic planning.

I think that out of these, we are missing "class collaboration" and "collectivism". So... fascism without the warm fuzzy side.

I wouldn't tell her. She was given up as an infant and has no connection to the biological parents. There might be some meaning to meeting them if she had been raised by them for any length of time - but she wasn't. DNA is not family. All you would do is (partly) rob her of the only parents she has known.

From Minnesota to Mount Rushmore, the coffee shops and bars are buzzing with talk of whether the moose-hunting mom is fit to be vice president.

Just so you know, Pittsburgh is east of the Mississippi and not particularly a "small town". Also, Montana is west of Mt. Rushmore. I guess they don't teach geography very well in San Francisco.

You should be more careful, otherwise you sound as stupid as Sarah Palin.

Witchcraft is a sad reality in many parts of Africa, resulting in scores of deaths in Kenya over the past two decades.

So Bill Donohue thinks that witchcraft is real? Is this really consistent with Catholicism? Even if it is....

6. Am I the only person in America completely sick of the "came to change Washington but Washington changed us" and his stupid bear DNA line?

No.

So at what point will anti-trust laws come into play? There can't be much competition in the banking industry left.

Little did I realize that when I turned 30, I became a geezer. I guess I just have to deal with it though: I'm a professor and I've had a few of my students friend me on facebook. Fortunately, I don't use facebook so there's little chance of me embarrassing myself. I only got an account to let my wife add me as her spouse there.

It seems like there are a lot of people who actually *want* financial Armageddon. A quote from one of the comments on Krugman's blog:

Maybe we can take half of the $700 billion and actually BUILD something tangible. Something that isn’t just digits on a computer monitor. Maybe the Armageddon will result in the transformation of the US back into a country that DOES stuff.

Financialization and its "Greed is good" ethos has been at best a mixed blessing to the US. We don't produce anything and like it or not, actually making stuff or doing stuff is the real meat of the economy. The rest is just a form of resource optimization; it can't actually create wealth.

By the way, China just had its first spacewalk and with our looming budget crisis, our half-ass Mars program will probably get cut soon.

Time's Jay Newton-Small adds that there is also "a mental health parity measure that requires providers of health insurance to include mental health coverage."

That assumes you have health insurance to begin with. The fancier health coverage is, the more expensive it is, the harder it is to afford. I don't like it.

Sec. 503 Exemption from excise tax for certain wooden arrows designed for use by children.

It's the international wooden arrow lobby up to their tricks again!