Obama is better than Bush and better than McCain would have been, in many very important ways. This is clearly not one of them.

I mean just for starters Obama signed the SCHIP expansion. Millions of children now have health care who did not have it before.

Even Noam Chomsky notes that the differences between the parties are significant enough to matter a great deal to the lives of many people.

It may be emotionally satisfying to say the Democrats and Republicans are the same, but it is manifestly not true as the policies play out in the lives of the weakest and most disadvantaged.

Naturally I am not saying this means the Democrats or Obama are good enough or that this is reason to continue supporting them. I'm just refuting a false equivalance. If your wage went up because of the minimum wage increase the Democrats passed when they capitulated on the Iraq funding bill in 2007, your life did get a bit easier. A Republican congress would never have done that.

Would America really be no better off if Gore had been inaugurated instead of Bush? I submit that such a claim is preposterous, however poorly one thinks Gore would have fared.

That would be Phil Donahue. Bill Donahue is an entirely different kettle of lutefisk (click sig):

Mea grand culpa! My apologies to Phil Donahue wherever he is.

Libertarians preferred

George W. Bush over Al Gore by 72 to 20 percent,

but Bush’s margin dropped in 2004 to 59-38 over

John Kerry.

http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa580.pdf

That's about what I expect. Libertarians are usually conservatives who just want to feel intellectually superior to the theocrats and warmongers while voting for their unenlighted destructive self-interest.

Even after 4 years of Bush's disastrous anti-libertarian rule, a decisive majority went back to the well because them libs will raise your taxes and take your guns, and that's more important than torture, wiretapping or having arsenic in the water.

Fuck libertarians. Your ideology is already on the dust bin of history along with phrenology and alchemy. Humans are not best modelled as rational consumers and thus the whole edifice of Chicago school economics comes crumbling down. To paraphrase what one wag said of communism "interesting idea. Wrong species."

Studies reapeatedly show newsroom workers voting in higher numbers for liberal than conservative candidates, overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates. I wish I could provide links for the stats on the Gore and Kerry elections, but they seem to be dead. Furthermore, there is exaclty one conservative news network: Fox. There is no conservative national newspaper, unless you count the New York Post,

I'm sad even liberals fall for this nonsense. Yes, journalists are liberal and vote democratic. So do Walmart employees. Is WalMart a left wing enterprise?

Who cares what the copy-editor thinks about politics? If the multimillionaire anchor or edior wants to cover a story using right wing frames, that's what will happen. Media organizations are not democracies, and it is the opinions of the owners and managers that matter.

The media is not left wing. The best proof of this is to watch the Rachel Maddow show. That is what a liberal media would look like. Substantive. Calm. Rational. Detailed. Accurate. Well reasoned. Etc etc. A liberal media would not go haring off after every missing white girl and go fucking bonkers because the president got a blow job. It would not have such a tough time admitting Sarah Palin was lying through her teeth about refusing the bridge to nowhere, or even in saying her RNC speech was mean, crude, petulant and pathetic. It was only a "great speech" if you think of politics as a rap battle.

You complain about the lack of a conservative national newspaper. Is there a liberal one? Just because conservatives say the NY Times or WaPo is, doesn't make it so. I'm a liberal and I'm not nearly so thrilled with either paper the way conservatives seem to like Fox and the National Review or the Washington Times. My idea of a liberal paper wouldn't publish George Will, Krauthammer, Broder, Brooks and Kristol every week. The WSJ publishes Thomas Frank for some balance and I don't oppose that idea, but both the NY Times and particularly the WaPo go out of their way to publish every conservative mouth breather. Have they ever refused a Lieberman or McCain op-ed?

The conservative world view is very much binary and if you aren't with them, you are against them. It may be fair to argue the MSM are not conservative biased, but that doesn't make them liberal venues. Paul Krugman should not have been the only national voice opposing the Iraq war vehemently. But he was. Bill Maher was fired for saying something obvious. Bill Donahue was cancelled despite high ratings for being too liberal.

as were the "global cooling" dupes, the "we will run out of natural resources by the turn of the century" dolts

Does it help you to know these are largely figments of your imagination? That there was never scientific consensese around either premise? It's amusing that you were complaining about being straw manned earlier.

Even if some scientists did believe in global cooling in the 70s, science is precisely the process of proving things wrong to get to better answers. Science used to believe the earth was the centre of the solar system. Are astronomy and cosmology bunk because they were wrong prior to galileo?