If they get rid of Steele they may replace him with someone really effective at winning elections. Do we want that? Let them keep this buffoon in charge, for heaven's sake!

Boehner, McConnell and their ilk should take a pledge: that if they or their progeny are ever in a position to benefit from cures, therapies or treatments developed through embryonic stem-cell research, they will not avail themselves of it but partake only of remedies arrived at by other developmental pathways. No matter what.

The expat American in Paris telling us that in Europe, the government is afraid of the people, whereas in the U.S. it's the people who are afraid of their government. That's why the difference between British reaction to gov't misbehavior and ours.

The military.

I'm sixty and have flown many hundreds of thousands of miles, including as PIC of sailplanes and small, aerobatic power planes and I have never, never gotten over the wonder of it all. Ten million years to get here and less than a century in the air, how can it not be miraculous to our DNA?

And yes, why would anyone want anything but a window seat??

I just re-watched "Sicko" and recommend that everyone do the same. When it came out in '07, whatever sense it made, however it might have made us long for a more rational approach to health care, we knew it wasn't going to happen on Bush's watch; we were depressed and demoralized. Now, with Obama in the saddle, look again at the insanity that is our health care system and the sanity that reigns in the other developed countries -- and it's possible to feel a sense of hope and encouragement -- that if we all pull together, we can have a system that works.

The gorilla in the room that Moore didn't spend enough time on, in my opinion, is this: in the U.S., we already have a system where everyone gets everything they want, where money is spent blindly and freely and the end user pays nothing for the goods. It's called the military. Germany, France, Japan, England, all these wonderful places where people get excellent health care, paid maternity leave, doctors who make house calls, etc. lack one thing that is crippling us: our "sicko" need to be the world's John Wayne, to bankrupt ourselves for one more fighter plane, one more dream of invulnerability. In these hard times when there isn't money to pay for everything we're going to have to get past our fearful insecurity complex before we're going to deal with the cruelty and unfairness of the health care system that is so excellently revealed in "Sicko."

The reason Sullenberger is a hero is this: any pilot in his position would desperately want to reach an airport. That intense desire could easily overpower the pilot's ability to rationally and very quickly do the math and realize that the most desirable option doesn't exist and that a more frightening but ultimately more statistically practical choice must be made. Because of his training and his involvement in emergency-procedure planning thought processes, Sully was able to make the right choice, whether it worked out or not. Call it professionalism if you want and leave it at that. But when professionalism is accompanied by that kind of steely self-control, when dreams of a solid concrete runway are banished from the terrified mind and the facts are substituted -- in my opinion it takes a very superior type of professionalism and it doesn't bother me a bit to call it heroism.

Good one, I'll use it. Now, where did I put those conservative acquaintances? I know I left them around here somewhere...

The emergence of Rush, Steele, and Jindal as the triad of conservative mental firepower is not only scary but terrifying. It, more then anything else, tends to link this awful recession to the great depression; then too, cco-coo demagogues found a voice and a following.

And this columnist hasn't yet stumbled, torn and bleeding, into the limelight to weep an apology to Rush? To wail, "I didn't meeeeeen it!"

Hm. I guess two days is for elected officials; it's gonna take a little longer to separate David Frum his cojones.

You make a historically valid point. But after two terms of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, excuse me if I'm not complacent about our two-party, winner-take-all system serving as an absolute barrier against destructive assholes rising to power.

Hitler started out as a marginal, bigoted blowhard that Germans figured they could tolerate because, well...no one really liked him, he was easy to make jokes about and times were bad but not that bad. Then times got really bad, people needed strong-voiced leadership and someone to blame for the state of things...and AH gave them both.

Right now, times are still relatively good and Dog willing they'll stay that way, but if we ever really get in the toilet, Dems may have reason to look back and wish they hadn't given someone like RL any bigger podium to stand upon.

What Brian said.

Jim

"Paranoid, poisonous ravings like this, in the face of a terrible national crisis, are revealing the true face of the contemporary American right -- and it isn't pretty."

If we pull out of this nose-dive, people like Rush will continue to make their ugly noises in front of a small, dedicated audience of losers and the rest of us can safely ignore them. But what if things continue to go South? Really, really South? The only thing that made it possible for Adolph Hitler to become anything more than a poisonous, raving paranoiac was the beyond-deplorable state of the German economy after WWI. Hungry, hopeless people need to hear two basic things: one, that it's someone else's fault and two, who that someone is so they can be eliminated.

"When they came for the gypsies, I said nothing because I wasn't a gypsy..."

That's really all I had to say. He's a moron.