It's a shame that Biden's moral backbone turns to rubber when he faces the reality of Israeli apartheid and Israel's ongoing illegal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

But then he knows he'll never lose a vote for having the 'guts' to speak harshly to a flake like Gadhafi, or for having the moral purity to take his sons to Dachau.

It's a very different matter to speak the truth about Palestine.

The moral?

Be brave, outspoken and moral, but not if it endangers your campaign funding and your standing in the media.

Why would Norman Kurz mistake bombastic speech patterns with "moral backbone"? Does he feel the same about John Bolton's time at the U.N.?

Biden is a plagiarist whose vanity has led to hair-plugs, capped teeth, and face lifts just so he can look good on camera when he feigns "righteous indignation" at America's failures.

Senators are meant to be the sagacious thinkers of our government, not the Bill O'Reillys. Yet, for some unknown reason little children and Democrats listen better when someone is yelling something at them. (Frothing at the mouth helps too.)

To equate being a blowhard with moral backbone is one of the funniest things I've read during this election cycle.

By choosing Joe Biden as their vice presidential candidate, the Democrats have selected a politician with a mixed record on technology who has spent most of his Senate career allied with the FBI and copyright holders, who ranks toward the bottom of CNET's Technology Voters' Guide, and whose anti-privacy legislation was actually responsible for the creation of PGP.

After taking over the Foreign Relations committee, Biden became a staunch ally of Hollywood and the recording industry in their efforts to expand copyright law. He sponsored a bill in 2002 that would have make it a federal felony to trick certain types of devices into playing unauthorized music or executing unapproved computer programs. Biden's bill was backed by content companies including News Corp. but eventually died after Verizon, Microsoft, Apple, eBay, and Yahoo lobbied against it.

A few months later, Biden signed a letter that urged the Justice Department "to prosecute individuals who intentionally allow mass copying from their computer over peer-to-peer networks." Critics of this approach said that the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America, and not taxpayers, should pay for their own lawsuits.

Last year, Biden sponsored an RIAA-backed bill called the Perform Act aimed at restricting Americans' ability to record and play back individual songs from satellite and Internet radio services. (The RIAA sued XM Satellite Radio over precisely this point.)

http://news.yahoo.com/s/cnet/83011357831002416338;_ylt=AgBK_melfjIHofQ3Dm.PkJEDW7oF

so ya better watch out!

Wow, troll city in the letters. And two of them are new to Salon, having fewer than 10 letters each to their credit.

Anyone with any knowledge knows the drug war is a massive failure that makes alcohol Prohibition look like a walk in the park.

The Salon poster "Silenced" has made the point that the drug war has become America's secular religion, in that it you must not only believe in it with a total lack of evidence of its effectiveness but in the face of a veritable Everest of evidence that it is completely counterproductive.

In 1970 the incarceration rate in America was roughly similar to that of other industrialized Western democracies, then Nixon created the DEA in 1972. Today America leads the world in incarceration of its citizens, no other nation on the planet has an incarceration rate as high as America and minorities are heavily overrepresented in prisons. The drug war is the driving force behind this massive imprisonment and disenfranchisement of primarily black Americans.

Biden is no friend of freedom, he strongly pushes policies that are antithetical to a truly free society and counterproductive in terms of reducing drug abuse.

Drug abuse is a social and medical problem, addressing it through a law enforcement model, as Biden strongly advocates, is like using a chainsaw to perform surgery.

Biden is far from a stupid person and it is simply impossible that he does not know how misguided and counterproductive the policies he advocates are. Biden is knowingly doing evil to millions of Americans citizens and for that I cannot excuse him.

When I read a reporter's encomiums for a politician, a powerful one with good possibilities for even more power, I distrust that reporter. I especially distrust Norman Kurz when I notice omissions from his idolizations of the "bad that men do", which Shakespeare wrote lives long after them (not really true!) The "moral backbone to stand up to Milosevic"! How many votes in Delaware does Milosevic command? He opposes violence against women? Such chivalry! Examples of Kurz's omissions:

At the confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas, Joseph Biden did not require that Thomas, under oath, respond to Anita Hill's charges of sexual harassment. Biden was so impressed, apparently, with the qualifications of the nominee that he did not want any possible blemish to stand in the way of Thomas's influence on the high court.

Sen Biden, on the Foreign Affairs Committee, on August 4th, 2002, before President Bush had made public his own intentions, announced his favorable disposition to a US invasion of Iraq. In hearings, later, on the ceding to the President of congressional responsibility for war, Sen Biden would not allow opponents of the giveaway to testify. In particular, he refused Scott Ritter the opportunity to present his expertise as a UN arms inspector to the Committee.

This is the man, Biden, whose judgment in foreign policy is supposed to augment the inexperience of Sen Obama, who expressed himself clearly before joining the Senate in opposition to the war-powers act. (I think, from Obama's recent flip-flop on FISA, were he back then a member of the Senate, he would like Hillary Clinton not have had the courage to oppose the President on war powers.)

At home, Sen Biden has, following the deregulation trend, long opposed sound regulation of the banking industry. He has tacitly permitted the credit-card industry to isssue cards indiscriminately and then charge egregious fees for late payments and usurous penalty interest to hard pressed borrowers.

While permitting the credit-card issuers to lend without investigating and then exact impossible penalties for violations of the fine-print, Sen Biden pushed through the changes in personal bankruptcy law (twice vetoed by no hero of US workers, Bill Clinton) that have made lifelong slaves of borrowers who face medical catastrophes and unemployment in their family lives.

Norman Kurz may have curried favor with the new VP-select for a bright, future insider relationship, but he has no credibility with me as a journalist - like so many of his lackey colleagues.

The Democrats have made their unfortunate choices. What is one to do? Reward the self-described "Party of all the people" with the White House? I don't think so! Let them fail again at the presidency and divide into parties that really represent voters rather than corporations! Vote for McCain? Hardly! For the next four years, we are stuck with Quagmiristan in Afghanistan, at least until the Chinese dollars run out. I shall vote for the Green Party in Florida or for Ralph Nader by write-in. That way the Democrats can whine about their loss in 2008 as they have since the defeat of Al Gore and John Kerry.