Talking to trolls is like getting into a fistfight with a mentally challenged person.

Sure, you can do it.. by why would you want to?

She has a degree in journalism and was a sportscaster.

She has no problem parading herself in front of cameras either as a beauty pageant contestant, a sportscaster or a politician.

(Oh yeah, and her film clip criticizing Hillary Clinton campaign's claims of media sexism is precious, is it not?)

Sarah Palin's been craving the spotlight since forever.

Instead of complaining, why don't all the bloggers who watch MSNBC start a Net campaign to get their readers to email MSNBC and demand they use the hosts that MSNBC viewers watch. Tell MSNBC that we will not watch any of their debates or election night coverage -- we'll get our news online, thank you -- unless MSNBC reinstates the anchors who get MSNBC's highest ratings.

Let's see - Glenn, Crooks and Liars, Kos, Huffington, Americablog, Media Matters, Firedog, Pam's House Blend, Wonkette, Rude Pundit, Thinkprogress..... why not organize an email campaign?

Media outlets hate phone campaigns.

Anyone have MSNBC's phone number?

And the phone number to the head of NBC News?

I want to call the office of the chief of NBC News and complain, so he can tell that his decisions are unwelcolmed by his viewers. His viewers -- the ones who watch the commercials NBC gets their $$$ from.

Before the last election I hear a lot of GOP operatives claiming they might vote for Kerry. They got the attention they wanted. They got their articles published, they got on tv, they got radio interviews.

Then they miraculously changed their minds a few weeks before the election (when undecideds started paying attention to the election) and went back on tv and radio and wrote articles pounding the Democrats and their candidate.

Excuse me while I change the channel.....this is a rerun.

"""The Right may have ideas that the left disagree with, but I would never call them stupid or easily lead because of those beliefs."""

We're talking Fox viewers here, OK? Sean Hannity viewers. Fox and Sean Hannity can't be mentioned in the same sentence with "never call them stupid or easily led."

The "epidemic of autism" is the first junk science claim that needs to be debunked. I was a student in the 1970s doing clinical internships in the state psychiatric hospitals and developmental centers, which were filled to the brim with people we now diagnose as autistic. There was no diagnosis of autism back then. Profoundly retarded, childhood psychosis, childhood schizophrenia were some of the diagnoses used back then. Children were institutionalized and spent their lives behind the walls of the state, invisible to the general public.

It was not a conspiracy by the state or by hospital administrators or by doctors to lock those children away. There were no community services available to help families raise children with severe disabilities. There was no education available in the public school system for such children. Familes were larger in the past and parents couldn't spend all their time trying to keep one child from shredding his flesh and shrieking all the time while there were other children in the family who needed parenting. In the absence of community support, families institutionalized children for whom there was no treatment. It was common for people to find out later in life that they had a sibling they never knew about who had been sent to an institution. Those siblings lived their entire lives and died in those institutions.

Lay people may never have seen them, but those autistic children and adults were there. When the states decided to get out of the very expensive business of mental health care starting in the 1970s, those institutions and developmental centers were closed down. The newly discovered diagnosis of autism coincided with the closure of the institutions. Families no longer had a choice but to keep their children at home. That's when families began agitating for positive change in the care of their autistic children.

If those institutions had not closed down, I believe the majority of autistic children and adults would still be institutionalized. When they weren't seen, they didn't matter so much. Now that they must stay at home with their families and be a part of the community, families demand treatment and education for their children. And that is a good thing.

Certainly a reclassification can be A factor, but the fact is, people who currently work in the fields are convinced that there are more autistics than before.

Of course there are more autistics than there were before. There was no such thing as autism, thus there were no autistics.

Even since the diagnosis of autism was established, the diagnostic criteria for "autism spectrum disorder" has changed over the years. Many children who were not considered autistic in 1981 will be considered autisitic today due to the expansion of criteria for diagnosis under the umbrella term "autism spectrum disorder."

Since public schools began receiving money for special education for children with autism spectrum disorder, the number of children with such a diagnosis has skyrocketed. Parents and pediatricians want children to receive whatever special help they can get if they need it, and if a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder will get a child help, that diagnosis is going to be made.

Citing your own personal experience without 1 number or statistic does not make a compelling case about your opinions of "junk science".

If personal experience from someone like me who works in the field does not make a compelling case, then simply stating "people who currently work in the fields are convinced that there are more autistics than than before" without "1 number or statistic" does not make any kind of a case for compelling refutation.