...or how well they are delivered if the man who is making the speeches doesn't actually believe in what he is saying and shows a willingness to fight for it. Gotta give Dubya credit on that point. He may have believed in lunacy, but he got out in front and pushed hard for his lunacy and as a result, he got almost all of what he wanted. Obama? Obama is either weak, or he's playing us for chumps. I think he's playing us for chumps.

From OpenSalon (See http://bit.ly/3M7gTV, or click my sig)

"(T)he reason for that is -- in the time since I was there, 40 years ago, the Democratic Party has become like the Republican Party, deeply influenced by corporate money. I think Rahm Emanuel, who is a clever politician, understands that the money for Obama’s re-election will come from the health care industry, from the drug industry, from Wall Street. And so he’s a corporate Democrat who is determined that there won’t be something in this legislation that will turn off these interests. . . ." - Bill Moyers, on Bill Maher.

"Hope and change" is a marketing slogan, not a platform. By using such amorphisms as "hope and change" as the basis of his campaign, a great many people were led to believe that Barack Obama was one of them, that he believed what they believed, that he was a liberal, or at least a true progressive. But Obama doesn't believe what you believe, at least not if you believe in things like health care reform that benefits the masses and not the insurance companies, and not if you believe in stopping useless wars, and stopping renditions to nations that torture, and holding torturers and their enablers to account under the law, and...well...you get the picture.

Obama believed in getting elected. And now that he has done that, he believes in serving the same corporations and monied elite as the last corrupt president. And that is exactly what he's going to do. Is doing. Will keep doing...right up to the point that people wake up from the nice speeches and the diversions and force him to actually represent their interests.

During the last election, Obama said that we are the change we have been waiting for. He encouraged people to take an active role in making government meet their needs. Now? Now he wants those of us who want real change to sit down and shut up. Rahm Emanuel, Obama's White House Chief of Staff, has said as much -- see http://bit.ly/9TR94 -- pretty explicitly. As long as we keep carping, it makes selling us out more problematic than they would like.

I wish all of that were not so, but it is.

How about "alleged because cannabis is not addicting" instead? No physical dependency, no withdrawals and no addiction. No matter what the drug warriors may say. Cannabis is just about the most innocuous recreational drug known to man.

Ms. Myerson had a son who was a difficult teen. It happens. Smoking skunk (which NYT or no NYT is not "addictive form of marijuana" since no such thing exists) is not going to make someone violent or send them into a rage. It may make them one with the couch and a true danger to any sweets or snack foods within reach, but all that other is pure BS and I'm surprised that such silliness gets credulously repeated anywhere these days.

Please don't tell me that you are one of those "oil is the milk of the earth" abiotic freaks.

How did oil get seven miles down? How about the same way that oil got a thousand feet down, or a mile down. How about the same way that rich veins of coal wound up beneath mountains? Try plate tectonics. See Scientific American for a brief overview at http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=why-is-oil-usually-found (or click my sig.)

When done there, here's a quick search for you that will reveal other accepted facts according to the best current understanding of science: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=plate+tectonics+oil

BTW, before you head down the "oil is the milk of the earth" abiotic path, you ought to consider that if that were in fact true and oil were being constantly made/replinished at the rates necessary to keep up with current extraction (and had been that way for millennia), our seas would not have been filled with water but instead with petroleum. In fact, not only would the oceans be filled, but the ground we now walk on would be covered many feet deep in oil as well.

So...this abiotic stuff...does the earth only produce it to order as we need it, or is the theory just crap?

Please review the material here:

http://www.chrismartenson.com/crashcourse/chapter-17a-peak-oil

http://www.chrismartenson.com/crashcourse/chapter-17b-energy-budgeting

http://www.chrismartenson.com/crashcourse/chapter-17c-energy-and-economy

(Main page linked at sig.)