They do this because they have nothing else to do. They last this last election much more than most people realize. Look at how Obama won in spite of being black, inexperienced, and quasi-socialist. Imagine how much wider the victory margin would have been for a male Hillary without the Bill baggage. That is the true margin from the last election.

The Republicans have become Spiro Agnew's "nattering nabobs of negativism", full of bad manners, no common sense, and no common decency. It's just theater right now because there is no major election coming up to make the independents care. A year from now, it will hurt them some, but come 2012, unless they can come up with a reasonable decent candidate pretty quickly, the independents will have had three more years of this insane negativity and will be thoroughly disgusted.

It just doesn't matter in the long term. The Republicans will sink into obscurity or discard the nutters, and it is entirely their own choice.

Just like Vietnam, everything is coming up roses, we can see the light at the end of the tunnel, we have turned the corner ... but the light is the train, and we have turned so many corners that we are turning in circles with no exit strategy.

What a waste. Yes, we, meaning Bush/Cheney, broke it, now it's ours to fix, but it is unfixable. The Taliban will be there froever, it is their homeland, and we are just visitors. The only way I could see defeating the Taliban "permanently" would be to stick around long enough for a generation or two to grow up and become adults in a modern society, with something more to hope for than money from opium.

What a friggin' waste. The exit will be a fake peace, just like Vietnam, just enough stability for us to withdraw with honor, and in a year or two, the Taliban will be running the place again with us washing our hands of the whole mess, pretending to be surprised. If the Taliban had any brains, they would fade away until we leave, let us save face, and then return with no danger of us coming back in.

Wish we had a politician with the guts to recognize this and to just get out now. There is no single point in time during the Vietnam war you can point to and say "we did good up til here", where it would have been bad to pull out before and good to pull out after. It was a waste from beginning to end, did no good whatsoever, and so will this be. Iraq might actually survive, since it was an independent nation before, but Afghanistan? Well, yes it was, with the Taliban running it, and it will become that again, some day.

Just a waste.

Study after study has shown that torture is only good for eliciting confessions, not for getting the truth. We got poorer information from torture than we got from other means.

So can we throw Cheney and Lieberman and these other fascists in jail for endangering America? If they truly mean what they say, we should take them up on their offer of going to jail for the rest of their lives, as the end result of the means they believe in.

Conservatives, by definition, don't like change; it's not that the internet itself that scares them so much as not wanting to upset the status quo of society itself. They don't mind people having new toys like Twitter and iPods, they may even use them themselves, but they don't want society's overall structure to change.

Liberals, on the other hand, want change, embrace change, enjoy change. By definition, there is only one status quo, but multiple ways to change, and thus liberals will never be as organized as conservatives.

The extremists on both sides are the nutjobs. Extreme conservatives don't even want the new toys. If a manual typewriter was good enough for their grandfather, it's good enough for them. They forget that the quill pen wasn't good enough for their grandfather. Extreme liberals want change regardless of whether it has any purpose. Rip society apart; anything is better than the status quo, even anarchy or a dictatorship of the proletariat.

Which nuts disrupted the Town Hells more -- the first amendment protesters shouting down speakers and waving signs of Obama with a Hitler mustache, or the gunnies who stood by quietly?

Duh. You need to get your own sensibilities under control. The gun nuts did better at that than you do here.

Why wear t-shirts with messages or drive cars with bumper stickers?

Some of these gunnies wear guns everywhere. Why should they remove them for this special occasion? I have a truck gun which I have never used a such, but if I come across a deer half dead from a collision, it's there. Some of these people hike a lot and want something for those rare occasion when they come across trouble, whether two legged or four legged.

There is a huge difference between the shouters and the gunnies. The only disruption from the gunnies was caused by others who are afraid of guns and caused disruption themselves. The shouters, on the other hand, actively tried to drown out all discussion.

If the sign holders had been quiet, and others had disrupted the meetings in response to their Obama-with-mustache posters, would you call for the sign holders to go away? I doubt many of you would call for the abrogation of their first amendment rights. So why do you call for the quiet non-disrupting gunnies to go away? They weren't even waving the guns, just slung over the shoulder or in holsters.

I am sorry for those of you who can't see the difference.