You'd think that some sort of single-payer healthcare system would be a no-brainer for a wealthy, industrialized country like the US. But no.

This devotion to the free market and abomination of 'big government' and 'socialized' medicine seems to be a peculiarly American thing. It must be deeply embedded in Americans' DNA to defy all reason like this.

Correction: Kamiya says, 'in Europe, both "Democrats" and "Republicans" would be part of the same center-right party.'

In Europe, Republicans in their current guise, where they take their lead from the likes of Rush Limbaugh, would be considered extreme-right.

It was a bit of a daft thing for Harriet Harman to say, even if there is some truth in it. She must have known how it would be received, and you would expect the Murdoch-owned Times, no friend of the Labour Party, to make a meal of it.

She's not my favourite politician, but she's better than a lot of them. And to say "it only reinforces her sense of Palin-esque martyrdom" is too harsh. You may not always agree with her, but Harman is an intelligent and subtle politician, occasionally with her foot sticking out of her mouth, granted, but there is no comparison with the horrendous Sarah Palin.

Couldn't bear to watch the whole 'interview' but what I saw was disgraceful.

Taitz is clearly slightly unhinged but the this wasn't an interview; it was more like a mediaeval punishment where Taitz is in the stocks and the interviewer is throwing rotten tomatoes at here for the entertainment of the mob. Or maybe a circus where MSNBC throws the pies and Taitz gets them in the face.

Is this sort of stuff typical of American TV?

Paglia's piece is a load of worthless junk as usual, but she is right when she observes that Obama is beginning to restore America's reputation round the world.

Under GWB, America's reputation was, let's face it, deep down the toilet, and America and Americans (as surrogates for the American government) were widely detested round the world.

Outside America, people see in Obama a man who, unlike Bush, at least recognizes reality when he sees it, and we respect him for that. Those who don't think that's true don't, like GWB, live in the real world either.

It confused me as well. Right-hand drive cars have the steering wheel on the right and drive on the left side of the road, and vice versa.

And Sweden was not the last country to switch sides - Iceland switched from the left to the right in 1968. As told to me by an Icelander, pre-WWII they drove on the right, albeit with very few cars on the road. Then during the war, there was a large British military presence on the island because of Iceland's strategic position in the North Atlantic, and all the military traffic drove on the left, which Iceland continued with after the war before switching back to the right in 1968.

Firstly, it's Labour Party, not Labor.

Secondly, you're right that the ignorant misrepresentations of the NHS by some right-wing Americans has caused a bit of a storm here in the UK. For all its faults, nobody in the UK, except maybe a few very rich individuals, would swap the NHS for a system like the US's.

I'd say that the formation of the NHS was just about the best thing a British government ever did for its people. Churchill recognized this, despite it not being his government who introduced it.

We have rights but we also have responsibilities. There's free speech and there's free speech as fetish where no line is drawn between what is permissible and what is not. Where to draw that line is the problem - it changes all the time as society changes.

When free speech spills over into a serious and concerted (and, as far as we know, unwarranted) attempt to destroy an ordinary person's reputation and, in consequence, livelihood, then that's a step too far and should not be allowed.

There are plenty of people who don't know that "the low-numbered seats are up front" - my mother for one; she needs all the help she can get when flying.

I think it's fine to give information to people on the basis that some might need it even if most don't. London commuters on the Tube, for example, don't need to be told to "Please mind the gap" every time they alight at a curved tube station, but some people might: visiting Americans, say.

Huckabee bashes Obama and aspects of the government's foreign policy, but says that he is not bashing America. So Obama and the current government do not represent the Real America?

Democrats would never get away with that.

As a non-American, what I can't get my head round is why these people are so scared. Why the visceral hatred of a policy that would probably improve most of their lives?

Can it really all be down to the misinformation and lies spewed by right-wing talk radio and Fox News? Or is there something else at work here?

Stephen Amidon hits upon a very important point about our NHS - we're all in it together.

Apart from a few wealthy people who choose to buy their way out, it's national and its ours - all of us. We all pay for it through our taxes and we're all treated the same, no matter who you are, how well-off you are or how well-connected you are. And when you're all in the same boat, you tend to pull together.

That, and the fact that it works, makes us more willing to overlook its many faults (though not, of course, to stop moaning about it).