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Speaking of Canada... Please get that fascist Bush-wannabe OUT of public office, so I can again consider Canada to be a progressive nation, a place that I could move to if the U.S. continues to slide into... this shit.

Harper Watch: http://bushwatch.org/harperletters.htm

There is seriously something very frightening about that man.

In the interests of not making a book-length post:

http://www.bushlies.net/pages/10/
Top ten lies.

http://bushwatch.org/bushlies.htm
With more lies from administration officials as well as Bush

http://www.bushlies.net/pages/1/
War on terror lies.

http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/03/07/22_lie s.html
Iraq lies.

http://pearly-abraham.tripod.com/htmls/bushlies1.h tml
More lies.

Google " "bush lies" OR "Bush administration lies" " for another million or so pages.

George Bush and Bill CLinton.

...which is why they vote for people who know about economics and finances and so on.

Which country did you say you are from again? Because here in the US, very few people seem to vote based on economic philosophy & financial intelligence. If they did, we wouldn't have voted Bush back into office, a man with a terrible personal financial track record and a first-term President who racked up record deficits.

Sorry, but Rand here and elsewhere is spouting apologetic nonsense, to justify the strong taking from the weak without compassion. She has no understanding of the many possible senses of self or types of selfishness (beyond a narrow conception of self as solitary body). If you had stopped paying attention in your history class :-) and instead lucked into some stuff written from other than the perspective of the current victors, you would have discovered that the United States of America's prosperity was built in large part on the genocide of the native peoples and theft of their land (including by use of biological warfare) [which destroyed many cultures far more egalitarian and generally pleasant than at present], the slavery of black people ripped from their native worlds and treated more cruelly and peversely than most slaves throughout the ages, the theft of patents and copyrights and trade secrets from old Europe, and the exploitation of seeds and plants and animals imported from a variety of countries by immigrants (as well as indigenous ones cultivated for millenia like corn, potatoes, and tobacco again taken without just compensation from the natives), assistance from countries like France which saw value in the US prospering to the detriment of England, as well as clever politics and global economic strategy which helped destroy Europe during two world wars and led to immense profits from the destruction and reconstruction of those countries (including by the Bush family). Yes, there was a lot of hard work involved too by some -- usually not those who got most of the riches. Try reading the book A People's History of the United States or the book Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong or even the online: Confessions of a Recovering Economist. Never forget that there are two human components to wealth (beyond a healthy natural world underlying it all) -- labor and rent (or other monopolies enforced ultimately by state violence including patents and regulatory powers). It is in the control of rent monopolies that the greatest wealth is to be had -- and usually the greatest unfairness. And the trail of control over monopolies rarely leads entirely to labor -- except perhaps of an ingratiating or militaristic sort. Much of the generally undertold and underappreciated history of the US from the Trail of Tears to the fight for the forty hour work week (now being lost again) revolves around power struggles over monopoly power to make decisions about some resource (i.e. who has the right to use a piece of land or set working conditions in some factory).

If we are very lucky, robotics may bring us back to a level of spiritual and economic prosperity enjoyed by many native peoples for thousands of years, but supporting larger populations (maybe quadrillions around the solar system with self-replicating space habitats powered by sunlight and using asteoridal ore). Most anthropologists now accept that agriculture and related work was a huge step backwards in health and living conditions for most people, and only happened because of rising populations and ever more sophisticated militaristic bureaucracies.

Rather than restricting citizen's rights to ask questions, it's much better to choke off the seditious answers. With so many negative stories,, dangerous voices of dissent and defeatist rumourmongers creeping around the dangerous and unregulated Internet, it's high time we had a clampdown on traitors!