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I just wanted to say thanks for the long, interesting and considerate answer.

For a few more quick points, first let's say that many Australians also have a deep distrust of GWB's motives, but I'm pretty sure neither Europeans by and large or Australians want Bush to fail. I think by now the point has been made that Iraq's invasion was considerably tougher than expected, and no one has a solution. Cut'n run is not going to have positive effects, and on the other hand, Americans will probably not accept another few thousands troop deaths. The US army is not going to like it either, this is dreadful for its future (recruitment, etc). I imagine fewer are signing up for ROTC today. Ultimately this is not so good for US society.

The only way out I can see is to go the UN (which in this context is just a forum) and have a multinational force sent in under US supervision, but including troops from nearby Arab countries. This might mean that Israel will be asked to tone down its bombing of Lebanon and resume talks with Palestinians, etc.

The situation is very complex in the Middle East. I think it would have been easier to wait out on Saddam Hussein and not intervene, but now it is too late. Everyone should join in to defuse the powder keg that is Iraq today.

The last thing I wanted to point out is that one should perhaps not limit one's impression of a country based on what can be read in newspapers. Even though the dispute between old Europe and the US on Iraq was really quite robust, in actual fact anti-terrorism collaboration between the EU and the US is widely regarded as excellent.

The McCain-Feingold bill (a.k.a. Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2001) did impose some limitations that might be fairly said to be limitations on political speech. Specifically, there is a provision that prevents other political groups (e.g. 527 committees) from airing "issue ads" around election time. From the Brookings institution analysis:

Electioneering Communication: Restrictions on Corporations and Labor Unions (sec. 203)

Corporations and labor unions are prohibited from running or indirectly financing electioneering communications identifying or targeting a federal candidate within 60 days of a general election. Only a corporation or labor union's registered PAC may fund such activities with hard dollars.

Now, of course, it doesn't actually prevent people from voicing their views, but it does in theory make it harder for citizens to have their voices heard during the most crucial time (usually FEC restrictions are put on candidates, not all citizens). It's debatable whether this is limiting money or limiting speech, but it sure looks uncomfortably close to effectively limiting political speech to those of us concerned with protecting the 1st amendment. One instance in which this came up was in 2004, when the conservative group Citizens United tried to get the FEC to stop Michael Moore from running adds for his movie Fahrenheit 9/11, claiming it was clearly political content covered under McCain-Feingold.

All that being said, Russ Feingold was the only person in the U.S. Senate to have the balls to vote against the USA PATRIOT act. In a time when other politicians were pandering to hystaria and rushing to take what they knew would be (at least in the near term) a popular position, he stood up for principle; he stood for liberty. So, yeah, I don't think I agree with that part of McCain-Feingold, but it's just foolishness to suggest that Feingold has not been a defender of liberty.

Under the AFT proposal, taxes would rise for households in the bottom 90 percent of the income distribution, while households in the top 1 percent would receive an average tax cut of over $75,000. [...] There appears to be little sound motivation for heaping huge tax cuts on precisely the groups whose income and wealth have benefitted the most from recent events, and raising burdens significantly on others.

This AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies article by Mark S. Nadel is also relevant to showing the case against intellectual property.

http://www.aei.brookings.org/publications/abstract .php?pid=302

From the abstract: This article questions the economic justification for copyright laws prohibition against unauthorized copying. Building on the thesis of Stephen Breyers 1970 Harvard Law Review article, The Uneasy Case for Copyright, it contends that not only may copyright laws prohibition against unauthorized copying (17 U.S.C. 106) not be necessary to stimulate an optimal level of new creations, but that 106 appears to have a net negative effect on such output! It observes that the higher revenues that 106 generates for popular creations are, in the lottery-like entertainment markets, generally used for promotional efforts (rent seeking), and that such marketing crowds out many borderline creations. The article also identifies and explains how new technologies and social norms provide many viable business models for financing new creations relying on only a heavily abridged version of 106. Hence, the article questions whether the current 106 could survive the intermediate scrutiny standards of the First Amendment, given the lack of evidence that the benefits of 106 exceed its costs.

This is a fantastic paper. It is full of references and numbers a lot of hard work and scholarship obviously went into it.

For support for eliminating copyrights or greatly reducing their terms, see Richard Stallman, especially here:
http://www.memes.net/index.php3?request=displaypag e&NodeID=650

and also Brian Martin's essay "Against intellectual property" (part of a large book -- _Information Liberation_)
http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/98il/i l03.html

You can also see lots of other ongoing discussion here on Lawrence Lessig's blog here http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig/blog/ and in his two books.

Here are some of my own comments on the situation: http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/mt/mt-comments.cgi?en try_id=898 http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/mt/mt-comments.cgi?en try_id=889

Well here's the letter. Lets be grateful the Internet wasn't regulated, we would still all be trying to use ISO. Just think what can be done if the Internet is coupled with a free market in communcations.

I'm sorry, but if you're referring to Cato's Other Links Of Interest page, you didn't look closely enough. Heck, they link to the Brookings Institute too; can we claim on that basis that they are secretly Democratic Party supporters, advocates of greater regional planning and a "fair" living wage? I think not. That page is simply collection of links to various and sundry think tanks that might be of interest to Cato browsers. There's a libertarianish bias to the list but there are also a lot of outliers. IOS no more exemplifies Cato's core focus than does Brookings or Hoover or the Urban Institute.

Side note: I'm personally a Cato sponsor. And nope, I've got no interest in supporting the IOS.