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Yeah... although I'd prefer Ron Paul, I *can* think of reasons to vote Obama back in again:

; . . . Paul isn't going to be supported by the republicans because they prefer an idiot or a scumbag to an actual conservative who would try to obey the constitution. Which, I guess, is why I'm seriously thinking about voting for Obama. Again. . . .

So you really are borderline between the libertarian, mini-Federal government, personal liberty, no Federal healthcare mandate, uber-Constitutionalist Dr. Paul or the liberal, make big government bigger, bureaucrats know best, grow the mandates, President Obama? Really?

What part of this do you think the small goverment libertarian leaning Dr. Paul would approve of?

Fourteen months into his presidency, in March 2010, Obama succeeded in muscling through Congress a partial government takeover of the national health-care system. That legislative accomplishment followed Obama’s decision a year earlier, without congressional approval, to nationalize two of the country’s Big Three automobile companies. In the intervening months, he had also imposed specific wage ceilings on employees at banks that had taken federal bailout money—the first such federal wage controls since an ill-fated experiment by Richard Nixon in 1971. Obama also made the federal government the direct provider of student loans, and did so by putting that significant change in American policy inside the larger health-care bill. In a September 2009 press conference, Obama suggested that a publicly funded health-care system might help “avoid. . .some of the overhead that gets eaten up at private companies by profits and excessive administrative costs”—thus mistaking the act of making money, the foundational cornerstone of capitalism itself, with the generation of unnecessary expenses.

In lieu of Ron Paul, do you truly believe that any Republican now running would move the country that far to the left?

Is Obama perfect? Hell, no. Is he better than Romney or Gingrich? Yes, in fact, so much so that it's a slam dunk to vote for him, if those are the choices.

At first I wasn't sure what to think about you. Are you bipolar? A troll? Simply unreflective? Now it looks like a Democrat playing a game.

Frankly, I don't see how anyone who declares a preference for Ron Paul could vote for Obama - their ideas tend to be opposite. It's like a vegetarian going out for a big steak dinner... every Friday and Saturday night.

Obamacare... for just the same exact reason as I am losing my much loved health insurance plan as well.

"If you like your plan, you can keep it" my arse.

Of course, the simple Syrians and Palestinians couldn't possibly have their own personal interest and motivation in returning to the land that they were expelled from. They are just pawns of Syria and Iran!

Of course they do, and for some reason, hundreds of them just jumped up and rushed the border TODAY! RIGHT NOW! BECAUSE IT JUST MAKES SO MUCH SENSE TO DO IT RIGHT NOW!!!! NOW! NOW! NOW!

Makes "perfect sense".

By the way, it is pretty certain that none of them were expelled from the land. Their parents, or more likely their grandparents, were expelled by the Arab leaders so they wouldn't get in the way of the Arab armies coming to slaughter the Jews. The "problem" is that it didn't quite work out the way they expected.

Racist pig.

I'm afraid there is a problem of ignorance. Maybe you could try reading this excerpt, or better, the whole thing:

1948, Israel, and the Palestinians: Annotated Text

What makes these Jewish efforts all the more impressive is that they took place at a time when huge numbers of Palestinian Arabs were being actively driven from their homes by their own leaders and/or by Arab military forces, whether out of military considerations or in order to prevent them from becoming citizens of the prospective Jewish state. In the largest and best-known example, tens of thousands of Arabs were ordered or bullied into leaving the city of Haifa on the AHC’s instructions, despite strenuous Jewish efforts to persuade them to stay.[37] Only days earlier, Tiberias’ 6,000-strong Arab community had been similarly forced out by its own leaders, against local Jewish wishes.[38] In Jaffa, Palestine’s largest Arab city, the municipality organized the transfer of thousands of residents by land and sea;[39] in Jerusalem, the AHC ordered the transfer of women and children, and local gang leaders pushed out residents of several neighborhoods.[40]

Tens of thousands of rural villagers were likewise forced out by order of the AHC, local Arab militias, or the ALA. Within weeks of the latter’s arrival in Palestine in January 1948, rumors were circulating of secret instructions to Arabs in predominantly Jewish areas to vacate their villages so as to allow their use for military purposes and to reduce the risk of becoming hostage to the Jews.

By February, this phenomenon had expanded to most parts of the country. It gained considerable momentum in April and May as ALA and AHC forces throughout Palestine were being comprehensively routed. On April 18, the Hagana’s intelligence branch in Jerusalem reported a fresh general order to remove the women and children from all villages bordering Jewish localities. Twelve days later, its Haifa counterpart reported an ALA command to evacuate all Arab villages between Tel Aviv and Haifa in anticipation of a new general offensive. In early May, as fighting intensified in the eastern Galilee, local Arabs were ordered to transfer all women and children from the Rosh Pina area, while in the Jerusalem sub-district, Transjordan’s Arab Legion likewise ordered the emptying of scores of villages.[41]

As for the Palestinian Arab leaders themselves, who had placed their reluctant constituents on a collision course with Zionism in the 1920’s and 1930’s and had now dragged them helpless into a mortal conflict, they hastened to get themselves out of Palestine and to stay out at the most critical moment. Taking a cue from these higher-ups, local leaders similarly rushed en masse through the door. High Commissioner Cunningham summarized what was happening with quintessential British understatement:

You should know that the collapsing Arab morale in Palestine is in some measure due to the increasing tendency of those who should be leading them to leave the country. . . . For instance,

Yes, in fact bureaucrats do have a better track record than for-profit companies.

Bureaucrats have worked out so well for California, haven't they? Oh, wait...

One line summary of Rhodes' book: Soviets good, Americans bad. This guy clearly has an ax to grind, and with such an ax in hand, he can chop up the truth however he sees fit in assembling his book. Maybe he and Gavin Menzies should compare notes.

No, I am talking about Muslims in general. It's pretty hard to tell the difference between "normal" Muslims and "fanatical" ones.

those fanatic Muslims are that very exception I was talking of, and my point was that they are only minority.

They're not a minority.

Except they are a minority. Ask most Iranians if they want to wipe Israel off the map and most say no. In "Commentary" magazine Ze'ev Maghen wrote the article "Eradicating the 'Little Satan'". He says "It is not their genuine, vehement hatred that we have to fear; it is their endless, drone-like training" Iranians hear and see in the media as well as at mosques and on the streets. He further argues that because Iranians don't "mean it" they are actually more dangerous. He compares what's happening today in Iran to what happened in NAZI Germany. Most Germans didn't hate Jews but the repetitive drumming of antisemitism, which isn't really antisemitism, dehumanized Jews.

Falcon

Oh, people may question my remark about how I say what's perceived as antisemitism really isn't. Broken down antisemitism is "anti", against and "Semite", "a member of a group of Semitic-speaking peoples of the Middle East and northern Africa". Both Hebrews and Arabs are Semites however many Anti-Semitics are against Jews or Hebrews but not Arabs. Also not all Arabs are Muslims, there are some Christians and Jewish Arabs too. There are also Jews for Allah.

I don't know about that...maybe some of the appearance of conservatism is changing, or softening perhaps. But I've seen it growing too. Here's an interesting piece from a Commentary Magazine: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/is-conservatism-finished--10812

It also has interesting political commentary and history about how presidents and politicians have been portrayed by the media throughout the years.

Anytime people start declaring that such and such is dead or over, is a time you're witnessing stupidity...ideologies don't die, and when their impending doom is prophecied the counter-reactions upsurge to prove the prophets to be false, and idiots.

As President, he would be faced with a bill that has ALREADY passed, and....what? He can't retroactively veto it. He can demand Congress change the bill, but Presidential demands are variable in power...

That may be true for ordinary mortal Presidents. But His Holiness has already promised his tenure will see "the rise of the oceans [begin] to slow and our planet [begin] to heal..." So a trifling thing like rolling over the will of the American people should be a snap.

that Tim Russert is gone?

Oh, that's right. Every other mainstream reporter not employed by Fox.

Not to mention Slashdot itself.

Now let the ritual downmodding begin.

RIP.

If you really want to read about the Pentagon/media issue, read this:

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/boot/3466

If you're really interested in the drug companies and patents, here's a reasonably accurate look at how things work:

Of Pills and Profits

Under the Shah, corruption in government contracting notoriously added some 15 percent to the cost of everything that was bought, from fertilizers for the ministry of agriculture to helicopters. Now the graft is more like 30 percent; the family and cronies of the Shah, it turns out, were paragons of self-restraint as compared with the clerics. They now form an entire class of exploiters, with the result that a bitter anti-clericalism has become widespread in Iran as it never was before.

The general consensus in the media, popular culture, and commentary on places like slashdot seems to be that the conflict in Iraq is totally lost, but despite Bush's dumbassery, I'm still not convinced that's the case. There's an interesting article ("The Real Iraq") I was reading today by Amir Taheri, about how the realities he finds in Iraq are different from what the media portrays. He also discusses a number of signs which cause him to believe conditions in Iraq are getting progressively better (especially compared to what they were pre-war).

I'm still not entirely certain I agree, but it's an interesting read nonetheless. A quote:

Since my first encounter with Iraq almost 40 years ago, I have relied on several broad measures of social and economic health to assess the countrys condition. Through good times and bad, these signs have proved remarkably accurateas accurate, that is, as is possible in human affairs. For some time now, all have been pointing in an unequivocally positive direction.

The first sign is refugees. When things have been truly desperate in Iraqin 1959, 1969, 1971, 1973, 1980, 1988, and 1990long queues of Iraqis have formed at the Turkish and Iranian frontiers, hoping to escape. In 1973, for example, when Saddam Hussein decided to expel all those whose ancestors had not been Ottoman citizens before Iraqs creation as a state, some 1.2 million Iraqis left their homes in the space of just six weeks. This was not the temporary exile of a small group of middle-class professionals and intellectuals, which is a common enough phenomenon in most Arab countries. Rather, it was a departure en masse, affecting people both in small villages and in big cities, and it was a scene regularly repeated under Saddam Hussein.

Since the toppling of Saddam in 2003, this is one highly damaging image we have not seen on our television setsand we can be sure that we would be seeing it if it were there to be shown. To the contrary, Iraqis, far from fleeing, have been returning home. By the end of 2005, in the most conservative estimate, the number of returnees topped the 1.2-million mark. Many of the camps set up for fleeing Iraqis in Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia since 1959 have now closed down. The oldest such center, at Ashrafiayh in southwest Iran, was formally shut when its last Iraqi guests returned home in 2004.

. . . and more anti science comes from the Post-Modern left. When Harvard University President, Larry Summers, suggested that innate differences between men and women might have something to do with the underrepresentation of women in the hard sciences, he was reprimanded for expressing a politically incorrect opinion--science be damned. Some scientific perspective on the kerfuffle can be had here.

Don't go holding your breath:

The Inequality Taboo
It's time to start talking about differences between groups of people.
BY CHARLES MURRAY
Wednesday, October 12, 2005 12:01 a.m.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/forms/printThis.html ?id=110007391

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/production/files /murray0905.html#Charles%20Murray

Sigh...

Well, is this racist?

I suspect a lot of egalitarians would say yes.

They'd like to think that everything having to do with intellectual abilities is equally distributed -- men/women blacks/jews/asians/whites/arabs. So I guess to them it is racist.

That's what's wrong with the concept of "hate speech" -- one man's gathering of facts and stastistics bees racist to another.

Still, especially given its promise, Pornified disappoints. Paul's argument is repetitive, and her prose dreary, a result in part of her overreliance on polls and surveys. She might have saved herself the trouble. As she herself concedes, most of the mind-numbing numbers she transmits are unreliable. Too often, they are also implausible. At one point she cites a Christianity Today survey in which 40 percent of clergy supposedly confessed that they were patrons of Internet porn-- a figure exceeding that for the general male population.
Paul is also too quick to assume a direct connection between exposure to pornography and corrupted behavior. In her scheme of things, men click on "Live Asian Sluts" and then expect to make their experience imitate it. But surely this oversimplifies things. The obsessive, three-hour-a-day user or the callow teen may indeed develop a distorted view of women and sex because of pornography, but is that necessarily the case for the occasional curious web surfer? Paul shows little interest in such distinctions.

There's a pretty good essay written by Charles Murray entitled "The Inequality Taboo" here: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/production/files /murray0905.html. Long reading, though. You have been warned.

The always reliable Arts and Letters Daily links to an interview with de Soto, a review and extract in the NYT and reviews here and here.