Only paid subscribers should be permitted to post. This will discourage the same person from spamming the comments under different IDs. At the very least it should cost 35+ dollars per ID to hammer the comments as the trolls are now doing.

That done, PLEASE let us individually screen out the trolls. Let us flag them. Let them be removed from our individual sight. Otherwise, Salon's letter pages will remain worldnetdaily spam, and we will stop reading - and subscribing.

John Brown was a terrorist by current American definition. So were the colonial revolutionaries. And so were the Jewish men and women who took the British hostage in Palestine to obtain their state. Yet we laud them all.

Most human misery is caused by semantic disorientation.

We ARE dying out here without proper health care. If you've exhausted your pay, 401K, in-laws and family charity, federal and state programs and any charity you can beg for, you go home and you DIE without proper treatment. That's what the Harvard study told you, and it is what I am telling you. We. Are. Being. Told. To. Go. Home. And. Die. Quietly.

The vast majority of Americans REALLY DON'T know what the hell happened to the world's economy last year. Polls show it, and newscasters demonstrate their "balance" and ignorance by spouting right wing talking points. Most Americans think that poor people caused the crash!

The letter sections are being colonized, more and more, by wingnuts, both anti-intellectual and pseudo-intellectual.

Moore never claimed to be a great filmmaker. He is a humble man who makes films about the most important subjects of our time, subjects that are not covered without right wing spray painted assumptions by almost any mainstream media venue.

Being in the movie doesn't make him a glory hound. He has always been in his documentaries as the conductor and the narrator. It's his trademark - it wouldn't be a Moore movie if he wasn't in it.

Once again: right wing character smears all over the letters.

Leninist? You don't know what the word means.

Glenn Beck? Beck is a god damned, conscious open-eyed liar trying to be another Rush-like tycoon. Moore does not lie. Beck is wrong on facts and conclusions. Moore simply lists the facts. WHAT has Moore been wrong about? He has fact checkers run over every word he puts to film. Bush's lies, his stupidity, the war, the love of guns linked to race hate and right-wing dreams of revolution, GM's greed, inept management and blindness that led to the collapse, bank and financial companies' fraud that led to the collapse of the world's economy and the taxpayer bailout that followed - truth.

Where is Beck's fact checkers, where are his editors, what are the consequences for him after all he has done? Time magazine gives him a cute cover and a "balanced" story. That bastard is on track to get the President killed by yet another right wing murderer.

This wouldn't be because Moore states the bald truth, ain't skinny, ain't beautiful, and makes everyone's boss pissed off?

You are aware that his entire body of work has been based on his physical presence in the movie?

:checking: This is Salon, isn't it?

This is taking potshots at his personality, not about the movie.

Are there no liberal magazines left? One after another, going to "balance".

Going to see it now. Thanks. Wasn't sure before.

Ferguson is incorrect. The regulators did not fail to do their job. The derivatives market was deregulated in 1999, and credit default swaps and similar cons came into existence in the vacuum. The collapse came because free-market ideology trumped historical lessons learned by our great-grandparents: the idea that government gets in the way and should be removed from the picture. Truly free markets, as Jerry Pournelle once said, will eventually sell human flesh if there's a profit in it. We have governments to stop them from selling our flesh for top dollar, metaphorically or not. This time they sold us out for trillions. They will again, only next time, there won't be enough money in the world to bail them out. Not that they'll mind; the architects of this drama will never suffer for their greed. On the contrary, they will buy the wreckage caused by their ideology for even more profit.

Obama has four years, probably, to get a bill passed. Roosevelt didn't get what he wanted for years. Hell, he had to rig the Supreme Court to get any traction.

This is not a NASCAR race. Obama will not live or die on this bill, this year. Or, if he does, the cause will be this movie notion of how politics work.

Clinton tried to formulate a bill and have Congress ratify it. The medical industry sprayed Hillary with its lies and killed it. Obama is trying the opposite, letting Congress make the bill. The medical industry is lying and killing it.

Next year, Obama will just ram through what he wants, as Bush did every damned time. He'll learn.

I don't think Jefferson cooked a meal his entire life.

We just sentenced a man to thirty YEARS in prison for "terrorist" connections: helping run a charity for Hamas. He wasn't accused of doing nasty things. Just being connected to anything Hamas is "terrorism", and you lose your life.

Hamas is the elected government! How far up Israel's rectum are we that we torture (30 years is torture by the slowest possible method, loss of your real life) a man for being connected to a charity because it might in some way be a part of the elected government of Palestine? Let that man go. We manufacture the people who attack us.

A lot of police and federal agents are born-agains, Catholics, and other fellow-travelers with the killer's movement. They may, and do, drag their feet when the clinics are vandalized and personnel are attacked.