All this time Rush considered Hillary to be the easier candidate to defeat in November, and now that she's slipped even farther behind, confirming that assessment, he's changing his tune? It seems obvious that he has now concluded that Obama will be the nominee and is beginning a deliberate attempt to undermine him.

In a real life "ticking bomb" scenario if the terrorist suspect was being tortured wouldn't he or she simply give false but plausible information to the interrogator? The authorities would have to follow up on it, and by the time they realized they had been sent on a wild goose chase it would be too late...the real bomb would have gone off.

The issue of unequal application of the death penalty depending on race is certainly of great importance. But the most fundamental problem with the death penalty is the virtual certainty of wrongful executions of people who are in fact innocent. The latest figure I am aware of showed about 3300 people on death rows throughout the U.S. If just 1/3 of 1 percent of those people were convicted mistakenly it means about eleven people in line to be wrongfully executed. And what would you like to bet that the actual rate of mistakes is significantly higher than that? For that reason alone the death penalty should be thrown out. All the other questions relating to racial disparities in its application or whether it should be allowed for juveniles, the mentally ill or the retarded simply reinforce the case.

The fundamental fact is that the supplies of oil on this planet are finite and limited and that simply using them up faster is not a prudent long term solution to our energy problems. While Bush is willing to rhetorically support the idea of developing clean, sutainable alternative sources of energy, we need leadership that will push us much harder in that that direction than his administration is doing. It is also distressing to hear him so cavalierly dismiss the environmental concerns that are associated with drilling in places like ANWR.

Well, if it's close enough that they're not calling it yet, then it sure doesn't sound like Hillary is going to get the blowout she needs. In that case it will make it awfully hard for her to keep arguing that her candidacy is still viable.

If a person simply can't see how utterly superficial it is to base one's judgement of a candidate or that candidate's patriotism on whether or not they wear a flag pin, then I just don't know what can be done to get through to that person. It's probably hopeless. The tragedy is that there are way too many people out there like that and they have way too much influence on the way our elections turn out.

So many of our politicians flaunt their flag pins and their "patriotic" rhetoric while in the conduct of their daily business they support the policies that have done such incalculable harm to this country over the last seven years. Their actions make it clear that their real love is not for their country but for advancing the economic and political power of their circle.

There are a couple of aspects of this that I find especially troubling:

. The fact that this only seems to be applied to Sen. Obama when the other candidates and the commentators themselves don't always wear flag pins themselves.

. The fact that the commentators KEEP ON bringing it up when it has already been discussed so thoroughly.

I do not drive because of health reasons and only go to get groceries once a week when a good friend of mine from church takes me. Since I get my entire week's worth of groceries at once I would have to have somewhere from six to ten of the cloth tote bags in order to trnsport them, and there would be some logistics issues with leaving the bags in my friend's car, etc. Fortunately, the supermaket I go to the most makes it easy to recycle the plastic bags, so most of mine do get recyled, except for the few that get used to line small trash cans. The article mentions how few of the plastic bags get recycled. While using the cloth totes may be a very good idea for many people, I think we should also be putting more emphasis on increasing the recycling of the plastic bags.

I am very relieved to see this article. If people were to actually let something like this insanely overhyped flap about NOTHING turn them away from a candidate they would simply be proving themselves incapable of rational decisions on political matters.

This false perception of McCain as a moderate explains why he and the two potential Democratic candidates are virtually tied in the polls at this point. Changing this perception and getting people to SEE that a McCain administration would be nothing more than a continuation of Bush's disastrous policies may be the greatest challenge the Democrats will face in the Nov. electon.

Oh boy, this is just what the country needs. Another ridiculously overblown flap about something somebody said that other people are twisting and misrepresenting for their own purposes. Gosh, there must not be any real issues in this campaign to talk about. What to do about Iraq? The economic hard times facing so many people? The tens of millions of people who have no health care coverage? Guess there's nothing to discuss aout those things. Better to spend the time minutely parsing a few sentences from a candidate in order to read into them whatever happens fit my predispositions. No better way to become a truly informed citizen and voter...right?