Many americans wonder about whether Obama is just passing out fish or figuring out how to empower the small businessman that drives this economy.

Not many wonder this at all. Simple observation, coupled with a fair mind, will discover that he is attempting to do both - albeit with a far heavier emphasis on large corporations than small business. This is because what really drives this economy are large corporations; the days of the small-biz driven economy are gone, if they were ever anything more than mythical in the last 40 years to begin with. There won't be a return to this glorious, mythical past because there's too much money in the alternative. Buy Wal-Mart, or buy nothing - that's your present and future, pal.

Sharing the wealth by laying massive debt on our children is wrong. This again is against American tradition.

Wrong again. It is exactly the American tradition now. Republican administrations do it as well as those run by Democrats. There isn't even much difference in where they spend the money any more. No, we are going broke because we've run our defense spending at "war levels" for many, many decades now. We're addicted to cheap oil and are saddled with a population base which demands more government spending and rejects enhancing government revenue...

Greed-minded politicians and sociopathic billionaires have run this country down for their own personal profit, while ill-educated uninformed rubes such as yourself have sat in the passenger seat cheering them on, all because you and the majority of your fellow American rubes have the pathetic dream of being a millionaire yourselves someday.

Those with a decidedly partisan, lopsided, wrongheaded, nutter view of the world will see ACLU approval is solid confirmation of "liberal bias."

The story Marianne tells is a cut-n-paste job, spread all around the anti-choice community. It is lifted almost exactly from a pastiche in one of the awful Chick pamphlets. In the late 1990s when the anti-choice crowd took to the online world to spread their lies and hatred, these bits were scripted even further: canned responses were written in order to make the false witness seem real. Not long after this, it became easy to out these lies by use of cut-n-paste and a search engine: the anti-choice zealots followed up with seminars on how to re-write these false testimonies in order to avoid detection. Their stories are always thin and quite easily debunked: because they are written by an insensitive, uncaring people, the stories lack essential details. The "college libertine" in this story, for example, who was unaware of "such options" as adoption. These missing details, along with the occasional use of certain phrases, are the dead giveaways that an anti-choice zealot is spreading false testimony. "Marianne" is practically textbook in "her" use of this technique, demonstrating that the anti-choice crowd is willing to violate more than one Commandment in order to impose their anti-freedom, anti-American ideology.

1. You have a massive ego.

2. you are a glutton for punishment.

3. You like seeing yourself on TV.

(FWIW, the first two are also why you edit Salon.com.) And by the way, I intend none of my usual negative criticism of you: it took major something (I won't say "balls") to face that shiteater. Kudos to you for that at least - in a nation of elitist cowards, you are at least an elitist with backbone.

Further proof that the perceived differences between "liberals" and "conservatives" in America are merely perceived. Kissling, like any blowhard right-wing moralist we might find on Fox News, knows what's best for women, knows that women have all sorts of frivolous reasons for not having babies, and must sometimes be made to own up to their responsibility. The only real difference between Kissling and an anti-choice moralists are their justifications: at least the right-wing zealots have a centuries-old religion to back them - all Kissling has is her self-righteous arrogance. Her arrogant insistence that she knows what is "right" for women puts her in the same camp as these anti-liberty zealots who scream "murder." Whatever her false uplift she gets from her faux-tortured, angsty liberal handwringing, Kissling is no friend to the pro-choice movement. You'd be better off putting O'Reilly on your Planned Parenthood panels than a liberal crypto-fascist like Kissling.

Maybe there were a large number of Iranians who support the old regime, but for reasons of their own decided to tell pollsters they were voting for the opposition. Sort of like how many Republicans, for reasons of their own, told pollsters they were going to vote for Hillary Clinton.

Or maybe the disparity between the polls and the outcome of the elections was due to the same effect witnessed in the 2004 election, when John Kerry seemed to be the victor in Ohio, but last-minute ballot updates and possible voter-machine chicanery handed the election to Bush with a slim margin of votes.

Or maybe it's like the 2000 election, where George W. Bush lost the popular vote but, through a combination of aggressive street protests at recount stations and questionable legal/court actions, was declared the victor anyway.

Yes, I can see why so many Republicans are so deeply vested in making sure the election in Iran goes "fairly." Their own historic commitment to "fair" outcomes in elections is notable. Just ask Al Franken.

You can't really put him on either side of the political divide.

Real Fascists are slippery like that. Neither left nor right, they are committed to only one cause: their own righteousness.

It really is amazing the glee that's in his eyes when he dreams of killing Americans. This is what becomes of empire building, I guess.