Vietnam was the same attempt to control another country "for their own good". Look where that got us. Pretty much in the same place we are now. Oooo. That's a surprise.

I expect the denouement to be about the same. We left Vietnam. There was a period of assholes and elbows - which was not nice. Vietnam is now a peaceful country. Iraq will be worse because not only do you have the people who are pissed off because they were being held down by the running dog lackeys of the capitalist, imperialist warmongers (Chinese epithets are just great) while we kicked them, you also have the sectarian divisions. So Iraq won't be pretty but it probably won't be any uglier than it is now but one thing's for sure, the longer we put off the denouement, the uglier it will be.

And the people who exhibited such piss-poor judgment, puerile planning, and amateurish execution should never again be trusted with sharp instruments.

The Federal Reserve was created to control the money supply and ensure the money's value. Prior to the creation of the Fed, money was issued by individual banks and a dollar from bank A might not be as valuable as a dollar from bank B (hence the reliance on specie). As a consequence of being the only issuer of money, the Fed had vast powers over the liquidity of the economy, a power they clearly didn't understand at first. It wasn't until the Roosevelt administration that the regulatory power of the Fed came into play because if a bank wanted to offer FDIC protection to their depositors, they had to join the Federal banking system which imposed, among other regulatory rules, reserve requirements. It should be noted that (a) a bank was/is not required to join the Federal system as long as they were willing to forgo the benefits of membership, and (b) up until a few years ago, there were still banks that were not a part of the Federal system.

It is not knee-jerk patriotism per se. It is the triumph of emotion over reason which is never a good thing. It is the same effect as parents who will never believe that their child could behave badly and lash out at anyone who says that they have behaved badly. It plays out every day all over this country when some kid who has punched another in the nose gets punished while the punchee who had been goading the puncher for hours gets off scott free. It is a blindness to an underlying principle of the universe, the only thing I actually believe in, cause and effect (aka causality).

The people you rail against are incapable of seeing the causality of action and reaction. And for that reason they are fools.

Like it or not, the male is held responsible for the physical wellbeing of the family. So we're not likely to start demanding things at work that will piss management off and get us fired/laid off. Society won't say: "Great job working to get a more human and humane workplace." It will say: "Why aren't you putting a roof over your family's head and food on the table?"

People don't have the balls to stand up for opinions that are not, as you would have it, serious and responsible. They apologize. If you question one of my opinions (as opposed to responding to my points and my logic), I'll just shrug my shoulders and tell you: Life's a bitch and then you die.

Unfortunately, the land of PC speak, the land of euphemisms that parades as discourse, has lost the ability to listen to divergent opinion that may be jarringly divergent from the PC opinion. That's one of the reasons why PC never learns anything. Nobody challenges them.

By the way, the opinions that Mr. Rose appears to have trouble understanding or accepting surprise me not. This whole mess has pretty much played out as I predicted in letters to my congressmen back in 2003 when I was urging them not to allow Shrub to launch us into this illegal and unjustified war. They weren't listening. That, too, surprised me not. Unfortunately, in our society the response to being wrong isn't to pause and rethink what one has thought, it is to shout the flawed analyses all the louder while attacking any other analysis on anything other than the merits.

While I agree with the court that the president does not have the power to willy-nilly order the states around, there is a clause in the constitution that says that international treaties signed by the president and approved by the senate shall be the supreme law of the land. Was this treaty not signed by the president and approved by the senate? WTF O?