I read this site every day, I've subscribed for year, there's always good material here...

But your exposés of the evil underbelly of the US military system have been right in the black. Walter Reed, Abu Ghraib and this series, bullseyes, stern towards the criminals, yet compassionate towards the soldiers (who are both criminals and victims - but somewhat more of the second...)

Thanks, Salon. These articles alone are worth the entire price of admission.

...and started working almost immediately, naming his team, researching policy and that sort of thing.

The fact is that in almost four months, the only positive sign of a move back to liberties I've seen was the announcement of the *eventual* closing of Guantanamo Bay - in a year!

This "give him a chance, it's only been a month" meme is devastating to the cause of freedom. Clearly the bad guys didn't give him a chance - they were on him almost immediately. The typical Democrat I've talked to says something like, "If in six months..." - well, what? In six months, it's game over! And what will you do, threaten to vote Republican?

The Democrats should have been pushing Obama to take the moral high ground from the start. They didn't. And people say, "He's a nice guy, I'm sure he'll do the right thing."

Everyone thought Reagan was a nice guy, too...

As a Google engineer and stockholder, I can't comment directly. And if I knew anything at all about Google's finance aside from what I read in the papers, I wouldn't comment at all!

However, classical financial theory models dividends as if they were going to be re-invested by the recipients at the same rate that you can finance the underlying stock purchase - in other words, at the rate a large financial institution gets when it borrows money to buy Google stock (using a repurchase agreement, or "repo").

The consequence of this is that a company should pay dividends exactly if the investor can get a better rate of return on the repos than the company can if they keep the money.

Right now, interest rates are low, so any company that isn't paying dividends might be doing so perfectly rationally without having to have particularly grandiose expectations of future growth.

The above analysis assumes a neutral view on the rate of inflation. If inflation were expected to increase, reinvesting the dividends into the company would make even more sense.

Again, had I the slightest idea what Google management was doing, I wouldn't say anything - I'm just regurgitating some generally-known information from my previous life on Wall St...

Look, he's nobody's "commander" right now, because we aren't at war.

And even if we were at war, he'd be the "Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States". Not my commander and probably not yours.

President Obama is a civil servant, working for the People and the Constitution of the United States, being paid with the People's money, and ultimately serving at our pleasure.

This hero-worship of Obama is every bit as bad as the hero-worship of Bush was. The response to any complaints like the article above always seems to be, "Obama's a nice guy, I trust him, it'll be all right."

He's done it to everyone else. The temptation to throw a little back is irresistible.

...luckily my sister is almost a decade younger than I so I have hopes of outliving her, but we lost both our parents.

The future is a strange place, we charge forward and where do we get?

You deserve hugs. All the best to you...

Sorry, Patrick, I have to disagree here on the airline safety issue - but it's a longer-term problem.

The people that you want to be attracting to the cockpit are steady people - smart people who don't like nasty surprises. If there isn't a good chance of finding a stable life, a life where you can raise a family and not worry about providing for them, then a lot of steady people simply aren't going to go into the airline business.

In the short-term, your argument is good - the pilots we already have aren't going anywhere, and down-sized airlines will have their pick of the best. In twenty years, the best will be doing something else.

As for heroism, I agree with you, and I don't. I agree with you that the landing is something that any competent pilot should be able to pull off under those conditions nearly every time, that Sully was just doing his job. Apparently, there's the same concept in baseball's major leagues - an outfielder should be able to catch a fly ball coming to him every time, or else it's an "error".

Point is that sometimes just doing your job is heroic; that competence is pretty rare these days, and so is good luck; that sometimes people deserve to get their moment in the sun just for being there and not making that "error" in that crucial moment when their luck holds and a lot of people don't die.

And it's a beacon to the young - something to encourage people to spend those extra hours on the simulator just in case.

So allow Sully his moment in the sun. He's handling it awfully well, clearly he's studied at the school of Armstrong.

[Actually, I couldn't make it to the end.]

"Every penny Rush has earned was the result of his rapport with a vast audience who felt shut out and silenced by the liberal monopoly of major media."

If there's a "liberal monopoly", why did only one major metropolitan daily come out against the war before it started?

And "enormity" doesn't mean "big". It's a particularly galling mistake, as there are many words for "big" and no other word meaning "the hugeness of a crime or sin".