"a glut of supply doesn't incite a crash so huge that the industry is crippled for years to come."

But the American Enterprise Institute says that the free market solves all problems! How could a crippling crash result from the perfection of the free market?

You're bursting my bubble, man. Next you'll be telling me that CEO's aren't demi-gods.

Joe's been my favorite since the Clinton witchhunts, so I'm going to wait and hope he will soon write a followup as to why John Edwards isn't worth discussing.

Conason is no MSM zombie, people. There must be a perfectly good reason.

Isn't there, Joe?

"You wanted to go live in that sandbox. Don't come crying back to us when you can't find anything to drink."

This Minnesotan seconds that emotion.

Southwest America has become an experiment in terra-forming. Wisely done, there's nothing wrong with that, but it's too damn expensive to pipe water across a continent. They should de-salinate their own local water first.

If humanity wants to make paradise wherever it wants, it better hurry up and find a cheap and inexhaustable energy supply.

Or live with the earth the way it wants to be.

I would be a Clinton supporter but for a handful of votes. I would support her because she's intelligent, articulate and savvy.

But it's amazing how many non-conservative people don't "like" Hillary. 15 years of smears have taken a real toll, and most people are more suggestible then they like to believe.

It's not Hillary who's divisive, it the super-rich, right wing media owners who divide us with all kinds of stupid trivia we get all hot about because the media harps on it. If "everyone is talking about it," meaning all the talking heads, then it must have some truth, right?

When someone who pretends to care about political affairs says things that are essentially MSM talking points, I know I'm in the presence of a regular American, not an independent thinker.

What is Salon coming to? Hardly any letters to the latest Camille Paglia dogwash?

It used to be such fun to read the eloquent insults to Her Snottyness, but those days may be over.

Sigh.....

LW is not alone, I and several friends left the orbit of theism by the power of independent thinking. It's not easy, but it's the only path to a self respecting intellectual honesty.

That's why independent thinking is so dangerous, to social control freaks.

New word of the day, don't become an atheist or an agnostic, become an "apatheist". Truly transcendental.

You can believe Jesus was joking when he said that, but there's no reason to think that Peter wasn't created and named for that role.

We can't know that Jesus didn't have a sense of humour, but then we really can't know that the whole story wasn't made up.

Believe if you must. As an apatheist, I just don't care.

There probably are quite a few soldiers who would like to help the Iraqi people, and maybe even a few non-soldiers too. But they can't do much because they're not in charge.

Fish rot from the head down, and the Iraq invasion is really rotten. Conclusion?

And Clarence Thomas has never given any indication that he identifies with or cares about other American blacks.

The worst Supreme Court Justice ever, a lazy and mediocre mind, a crass sexual harasser, but not a sellout to his race.

It's amazing that highly intelligent and educated people like Alan Dershowitz can be, in the end, so foolish.

He seems to think that by addressing all of life's affairs with a structure of law, we will avoid having to trust the judgment of officials and exercising oversight on them.

Dershowitz advocates accepting torture on the basis that it happens anyway, so we should regulate it and provide specific cases where it can be applied. We must provide a legal means to torture, in essence, because "sometimes we must." I don't accept this premise, and Dershowitz provides no support for it.

When people break laws for what are obviously good reasons to virtually everyone, there are existing legal remedies to prevent their punishment. And the "ticking time bomb" scenario has never happened except on T.V. ( every week on "24" ) Is television fiction an appropriate foundation for a new legal regime?

A legal structure for all of life's activities? Some people might think this is a liberal notion, but I find it reactionary in the extreme.

Dershowitz may be well intentioned, and he is without a doubt highly intelligent, but his ideas are stupid. It must be all those years of devising arguments for the needs of the moment, rather then developing a consistent system of principles and arguing for them.

"if you look at what fascism and statism and corporatism are in real terms, Goldberg makes some valid points."

There are no "real terms" for any word that ends with "ism." These words are nothing but abstractions, as such they require judgment to make sense, judgment that Goldberg and you, it seems, don't possess.

Most all people want to control other people's behaviors with government enforced laws. Expecting government to cure social "problems" doesn't make you a statist or a fascist, it just makes you normal. Neither Stalin nor Hitler, nor Mussoulini or Pol Pot or Mao were "liberal" in any sense of the word. They hated differences and individual rights. They were conservative reactionaries, all of them.

Goldberg's may make a few valid trivial points, but his thrust is manifest garbage. Do yourself a favor and clear his garbage from your mind.

That's pretty funny, Pappy. I'm glad to see Salon has finally attracted the moonbat-wingnut crowd. Without comics like you, Salon would just be a bunch of normal people talking sense to each other.

Clarence Thomas a hero. Tee-hee.