"For impeachment, you need hard evidence rather than a daisy chain of supposition, which is why Watergate added the phrase "smoking gun" to the political lexicon."

No you don't. All you need to impeach is political will.

Impeachment is not a nuclear bomb, it's a Constitutional tool that Congress can use to keep the President from getting out of control.

And Congress doesn't need "hard evidence" to impeach. It doesn't need any evidence at all.

My favorite metaphor: Capitalism is like fire, tightly restricted it can be a powerful force for constructive good, left to it's own it will destroy.

I haven't found a single libertarian able to argue against this.

http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle-old/398/whatepidemic.shtml

I'm tired of the media driven drug scare merry-go-round. There's no meth epidemic, at least if you consider statistics to be a better measure then a handful of horrifying stories.

Not to dismiss any individual's troubles with some drug or another, but there's no reason to freak out about meth, unless someone you care about is hooked.

America hasn't always been knee-jerk anti-torture. Torture has been used with great success right here.

Not that long ago in the American south, dozens of potential rapists of white women were discovered with the help of torture, leading to their summary capital punishment under night-time forest conditions.

And not long before that, we found scores of verified witches right in our midst. Without the confessional evidence obtained using these interrogation techniques, justice couldn't have been served.

Science can't answer questions about meaning or intention, and rightly so. The real scientist knows the limits of what science can explain.

I wonder if there are any serious researchers who could be fairly considered Scientismists. I doubt it.

Will Rove follow his mentor Lee Atwater in confessing his sins against America when facing the end?

Let's wait and see.

Newt is what we used to call an overeducated **ithead, like Bill Kristol. Some people can learn everything and understand none of it, Gingrich is a prime case.

Not to denigrate advanced learning, it's just not a guaranteed path to wisdom.

It's going where the rest of the country has been going for years, to a place where financial success and the comfort and status it brings is much more important then suffering for principles.

Romney sez:"She said we have been an 'on-your-own society.' She said, 'It's time to get rid of that and replace it with shared responsibility.' That's out with Adam Smith and in with Karl Marx,"

But Adam Smith said: "All for ourselves and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind."

Romney's even lying about his own father of conservatism.

"They are, yes, a little hurt that the United States is solving its problems with violence."

Care to give us an example of a real American problem being solved with real American violence?

What an asinine thing to write.

I like Dr. Cole's work, but I'm disappointed that he's joining the chorus of "be scared, be very scared."

Dirty bombs, hijacked airplanes, suicide bombers at shopping malls, none of these things scare me. Our country has faced far greater threats with courage.

35,000 Americans die each year from ordinary traffic fatalities, from something we do to ourselves. None of these boogie-man threats could come close to that number. And if they ever did, America would *really* go to war.

Call for it, make a big noise, and watch the numbers in favor of it go up.

The "we can't do it until we have enough votes" bunch are the ones who don't understand politics. It's not about having the power or waiting for the power, it's about gaining the power.

The way to gain the power is to show people you've got the guts to do it, not to whine about not having enough votes.

"the song was about a guy getting out of prison after all and not a war hero."

Coffee through my nose funny!!

I've long thought of myself as having "low social cohesion factor," evidenced by my desire to run the other way when seeing a mob on the march. I liken social cohesion factor to the attractive Van Der Wahl forces that holds water molecules tightly together, causing surface tension. In my metaphor, surface tension is the resistance you run into when trying to use simple reason to refute widely held foolishness.

Your points helped to clarify my own little theory. It's hard for most people to deal with thoughts that run contrary to the crowd.

OTOH, isn't using "synecdoche" as a verb itself a metonymy? Or is it just a misuse? :)

Excellent post, your work is another good reason to subscribe.

Paul Dirks made the tired, standard argument that the media only gives us what we want, as if we're the media's customers.

Baloney. Balderdash. Hogwash.

The media's customers are the advertisers. We're the product, and we will watch and listen no matter how stupid the programming, Q.E.D.

Darwin only said that evolution improves fitness for the environment.

So on a planet of fundamentalist whack jobs, all organisms would evolve to be like these Senators.

Pity, eh? Wish it meant constant improvement instead.