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Peace agreement?

The message: a peace settlement under a Nixon presidency would be more favorable to the South Vietnamese.

The biggest political success for Republicans in the last 30 years was convincing the middle and lower middle class to be afraid of the poor. They should instead be very very afraid of the rich.

That reminds me of how the late-19th/early-20th century populist party was smeared. For the (*gasp* fact based) debunking of that smear, see here.

while in America Individual still usually trumps the Collective

Unless that individual was black. Or red. Or yellow.

(And just a hint: people will take you more seriously if you drop the capital letters from "Individual" and "Collective".)

your ridiculous attempt to compare America to Nazis

Hitler's "final solution" was modeled in part on American genocide of Native Americans. Nazi eugenics were inspired by American programs of segregation, sterilization, and murder.

Anyone who thinks comparing America to the Nazis is "ridiculous" is dangerously ignorant of history.

http://hnn.us/article/153246

The native americans disagree.

The decline of the native Americans had many causes. The role played by the US federal government was rather limited. European nations holding colonies in the New World are at least as much to blame, if not more so. The main cause, however, was likely disease.

Were American Indians the Victims of Genocide?

Did the U.S. Army Distribute Smallpox Blankets to Indians? Fabrication and Falsification in Ward Churchill's Genocide Rhetoric and Discrediting the Politicization of History

The native americans disagree.

The decline of the native Americans had many causes. The role played by the US federal government was rather limited. European nations holding colonies in the New World are at least as much to blame, if not more so. The main cause, however, was likely disease.

Were American Indians the Victims of Genocide?

Did the U.S. Army Distribute Smallpox Blankets to Indians? Fabrication and Falsification in Ward Churchill's Genocide Rhetoric and Discrediting the Politicization of History

Believe what you will. My purpose was to provide explicit information and insight. Humor can provide insight, and serve as a power means of social criticism. The problem when dealing with communism is that the fans of communism will ignore or reject the joke, or even take it as serious when it is subtle. By the way - did you notice that post's moderation? 50% Interesting, 50% Funny. If you think that quip revealed more about the true nature of communist regimes than my post, you are a person of rare insight.

I accomplished my purpose with my post, and I hope you enjoyed the joke.

One last thing: The Soviets really did use real missiles in their parades, just without the payload. Western intelligence agencies eagerly awaited each years military parade for the purpose of intelligence gathering.

Washington Looks Back at the Cuban Missile Crisis, Part 1

Soviet R-12 intermediate-range ballistic missiles (NATO reporting name: SS-4) on parade in Red Square. The CIA used this photo as a reference point when identifying the deployment of this type of missile to Cuba. Photo Credit: CIA/National Security Archive.

Cheers

Have you considered the Jews?

If you are inquisitive, perhaps you'll find an interesting challenge in explaining this?

And I guess I would be happier I could believe in some god that was in control and could help instead of being all alone. A bit of blind faith in that magic can happen probably makes you feel safer.

Yes, tell it to the Jews.

On the other hand, I have never felt so free and relieved as when I finally decided to leave the church

Were you in the wrong church? Or do you cling to something more than you wish to know God?

Of course it's a bit scary when you realize you can't rely on superstition. :)

Are you sure that isn't what you are replying upon now? How do you know?

The Miracle of Jewish History

Over three hundred years ago King Louis XIV of France asked Blaise Pascal, the great French philosopher of his day, to give him proof of the existence of miracles. Without a moment's hesitation, Pascal answered,"Why, the Jews, your Majesty-the Jews." . . .more

The Miracle of Jewish History

Over three hundred years ago King Louis XIV of France asked Blaise Pascal, the great French philosopher of his day, to give him proof of the existence of miracles. Without a moment's hesitation, Pascal answered,"Why, the Jews, your Majesty-the Jews." . . .more

Most of those people showed up again in prominent roles during the Reagan administration.

They have names? Googling around, I see that both Nixon and his running mate Spiro Agnew were allegedly involved. Both resigned from office and weren't members of the Reagan Administration. Reading through some of the actual transcripts of LBJ phone calls, I see a number of people named off hand as possible collaborators, none of which had political careers after Watergate.

âPresident Johnson: Well, I donâ(TM)t know who it is thatâ(TM)s with Nixon. It may be Laird. It may be [Bryce] Harlow. It may be [John] Mitchell. I donâ(TM)t know who it is.

âI know this: that theyâ(TM)re contacting a foreign power in the middle of a war.

That's three people named so far that little, if anything to do with the Reagan administration. Toss in Nixon, Agnew, and Chennault, and you have six people who might have or were involved and had no career in the Reagan administration. So who are "most of these people" and what are their names?

What am I missing these items came out years ago. See http://hnn.us/articles/60446.html for a better indication on what happened then this poor summary.

Contrary to what you'd think from what politicians say, Israel is not a treaty ally.

It is certainly getting safer. The world in 2012 is a less violent, less belligerent place than at any time in recorded history :

http://hnn.us/articles/10-3-11/the-world-is-actually-safer.html

While there is no concrete reason to think that this won't continue, we have major time of upheaval on the horizon with shrinking food supplied due to global warming, and the impending robotisation of manufacturing which will displace millions of manual workers worldwide.

local police, homeland security, federal agents... all the same when you're at the other end of a bat wielded by a bloke with a uniform on.

Besides, there seems to be a lot of issues with US cops being somewhat heavy-handed, like the guy who was arrested for walking in the street (though, to be fair, he did have the temerity to ask the cop if he really was a cop as he wasn't wearing the usual uniform)

Nazism was a revolutionary movement that overthrew the Weimar Republic and cleared away the last vestiges of power held by the German aristocracy.

This is a gross oversimplification, to say the least. Nazism as a "populist movement" actually served to remove power from the German people (among other things) and place it into the hands of a select few who were partly comprised of and backed by aristocrats, including the British royalty and our own "aristocrats" on this side of the ocean (wealthy Connecticut and Rhode Islands families, the Rockefellers, etc). Mind you, this involved a transfer of power within the aristocracy but to suggest that Nazism was a grassroots movement that was inherently anti-aristocracy would be to perpetuate the same lie that a lot of German people fell for.

The real goals of Nazism (and WWII) were consolidation of power, population reduction and bringing closer a return to Feudalism:

The Nazi Roots of the House of Windsor

the Bush family & the Nazis

How Bush's grandfather helped Hitler's rise to power

Documents: Bush's Grandfather Directed Bank Tied to Man Who Funded Hitler

how the Bush family wealth is linked to the holocaust

ROCKEFELLER AND MASS MURDER

The Horrifying American Roots of Nazi Eugenics

Rockefeller Associates

Standard Oil Fuels World War II

You're just incorrect. You may have been misled by a modern American right-wing propaganda campaign. You should read what actual historians have to say about the idea that the Nazis were leftists.

If you're too busy to read the whole debate, allow me to excerpt:

Having set up distorted stereotypes of “liberalism” and “fascism” Goldberg finds them united by a host of similar projects such as campaigns against smoking (it was Nazi doctors who first established the link between smoking and cancer, and Hitler was a fanatical anti-smoker). These similarities concern peripheral matters. The foundational qualities that separate liberalism from fascism simply vanish from the analysis: political pluralism vs. single party; universal values vs. the supremacy of a master race; elections vs. charismatic leadership; fascism’s exaltation of feelings over reason.

He says the Nazis were left-wingers [americanthinker.com]

Actually it is rather common opinion among historians, that the far-left and far-right meet at the far end

Wrong.

That's because the US makes a big effort not to kill civilians,

While the US doesn't generally engage in atrocities (though there have been instances e.g. in Vietnam) their track record isn't exactly stellar. There's a big effort to keep it out of the US media, I'll grant you that but in the latest Iraq war there were a lot of reports of bombed hospitals and the like available to us not dependent on the US media.

not to plunder and destroy everything but rather protect and rebuild.

That's a joke, it's been true in exactly 1 case: world war 2. Again, in the latest middle eastern wars the "rebuilding effort" seem to be schemes to throw money at corporation friendly to the regime like Halliburton. What is built isn't worth shit, or it only gets half done and is of poor quality, funds go missing (9 billion of Iraqi oil money "missing" at last count), etc. (See for example Scandals, Military, Iraq War, Graft and Fraud

If they shifted to WWII era conquest and occupation you'd see profits - and roughly as much resentment as against the nazis (hello Godwin). The smart weapons are ridiculously expensive compared to just bombing the fuck out of everything. If they stopped giving a shit about protecting civilians and only protected themselves, answered all attacks with massive force, terrified the civilians into cooperating with them rather than Al-Quaeda you'd see costs plummet and profits soar. So it's not that war can't be profitable, just not the way the US is running them now.

The wars are plenty profitable. Not for the US government but for arms dealers, the corrupt contractors that swarm all over the occupied territories and the politicians that retire to cushy jobs on their boards. Follow the money (if it doesn't go "missing" that is.)

Not to mention that Eugenics played a pretty big role in the US before the 2nd World War. Only after discovering the holocaust it became "unfashionable" to sterilize poor, criminal and dumb people or those of the wrong race.
http://hnn.us/articles/1796.html

I remember watching the news videos of the last remaining people being pulled from the U.S. Compount in Saigon by helicopter. Not much winning there either.....

On the contrary, what you saw there was the North Vietnamese Army winning. And why were they winning?

What happened when Democrats in Congress cut off funding for the Vietnam War?

Historians have directly attributed the fall of Saigon in 1975 to the cessation of American aid. Without the necessary funds, South Vietnam found it logistically and financially impossible to defeat the North Vietnamese army. Moreover, the withdrawal of aid encouraged North Vietnam to begin an effective military offensive against South Vietnam. Given the monetary and military investment in Vietnam, former Assistant Secretary of State Richard Armitage compared the American withdrawal to "a pregnant lady, abandoned by her lover to face her fate." 2 Historian Lewis Fanning went so far as to say that "it was not the Hanoi communists who won the war, but rather the American Congress that lost it." 3

Sleeping With the Enemy
.

What I refer to as "The Wall". No winning there

"The Wall" doesn't indicate anything about what government controls Vietnam, it is a memorial to American service members who lost their lives in the war to defend South Vietnam. The North Vietnamese lost far more lives than the United States, have political control over Vietnam, and consider themselves to have won the war. That sacrifice of American lives was thrown away as noted above. South Vietname could have been free today, just like South Korea. Of course, that would mean actually winning, and some people just won't see that happen. (See Sleeping With the Enemy)

I wonder if the EFF had been around in the 1870's if they would have been accusing Alexander Graham Bell of "stifling free speech" with the original telephone....

Hmm...

On June 11 [2002], to little fanfare, the United State House of Representatives declared that the telephone was invented by an Italian-American named Antonio Meucci, a sausage and candle maker. Forget Alexander Graham Bell. The House declared that Bell's patent for the telephone was based on "fraud and misrepresentation."
http://hnn.us/articles/802.html

That depends on who's reporting you believe. Some say "Only 3!!!". Others say hundreds.

The point exactly... luckily we have the documents as released to see for ourselves and not depend on mainstream media spin. They are saying "thousands" of informers/collaborators at risk - but only three are listed as informers. The rest are just names, village elders, anyone they stopped at checkpoints etc inside coalition occupied territory. So the media machine is trying to pass off all these people as "informers", at risk. They might as well say that every Afghan in occupied territory is at risk if we talk to them - it's no less credible.

Given that WikiLeaks initially insisted there were 0, and now admit to 3 kinda indicates a loss of credibility on the issue.

Like you said, depends on who you believe. I beleive the raw document - three informers - possibly a few others exposed by GPS coordinates and no names, but that's a stretching the definition

The leak has exposed no new civilian deaths. All of the information, minus the naming-the-informants problem, was already reported in the media.

Again, misinformation damage control by mainstream US press - historically extremely pro War. Nothing to see here, move along.

If you think the leaks are new revelations, then you haven't been paying much attention to the war.

Or you have may not been reading outside of propaganda pieces. To pick just one overview of many available, see "The Significance of the Afghanistan War Diary" under "What does the Afghanistan War Diary tell us? To what extent was the information therein already known? And what is its significance now?" There is plenty more quality journalistic analysis on the content, with more being published every week provide new insights into the war - just search outside of the US mainstream media channels. Here is another example. Very hard to claim that none of that material was previously known, as you seem to have been led to beleive.

Actaully, yes they do. Every. Single. War. Ever. Since the stone age. Or are you going to pretend that carpet-bombing cities at night in WWII didn't cause any civilian deaths? That no civilian in Vietnam was mistaken for a VC and shot? That the 'road of death' in the first gulf war had no civilians in any of the vehicles? That bombing Serbia never caused a civilian death (or a Chinese diplomat's death)?

Nice straw man. I never said that civilians don't die in war. I said what's new knowledge to us about out own troops related to 20K+ civilian deaths. One example or many: Extra judicial assassinations of innocent civilian children, while they sleep. Or how about thousands civilians killed by "ricochets" - slang for shot in the head without a valid reason. Or do you claim that the US or coalition forces have always been doing that? Search "Task Force 373" exposed by the diaries, because it seems you have been hoodwinked to ignore any new material that has been exposed.

Actually, you're so busy projecting me as an evil person

I am not trying the project you as anything, and certainly not evil. All I am taking issue with is the propaganda being parroted everywhere you look in mainstream US press - so much fabricated and false information in an obvious damage control propaganda campaign - that even a cursory look at the raw data can disprove it. Shit like "Thousands of Informers and their families at risk", "Amnesty Int. Condemns Wikileaks" - all easily proved wrong lies if we stick to facts.

Even Amnesty International spokeswoman Susanna Flood confirmed that there was no authorized statement on WikiLeaks

Could you translate this into English?

If you think she criticized JFK for being pro-communist, then you obviously haven't read what she said, and are just repeating shit you heard some idiot say. I won't disagree with you about the wide paintbrush and hyperbole she uses, but if you're going to criticize her for something that is the opposite of what she said, then you're guilty of what you imagine she is doing.

http://hnn.us/articles/1554.html)
http://hnn.us/

If you think she criticized JFK for being pro-communist, then you obviously haven't read what she said, and are just repeating shit you heard some idiot say. I won't disagree with you about the wide paintbrush and hyperbole she uses, but if you're going to criticize her for something that is the opposite of what she said, then you're guilty of what you imagine she is doing.

http://hnn.us/articles/1554.html)
http://hnn.us/

I'm not a historian, it's just what I was taught. Here's an article I found which points out why I think what I think, and why it might be wrong.

http://hnn.us/articles/5641.html

This wiki article also has some numbers, saying maybe 40% supported the revolution. (What "support" means is not given.)

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Loyalist_%28American_Revolution%29

I wasn't there doing public opinion polls so I don't know what's right or wrong. If my facts can be shown to be wrong, I'll concede the point. But, again, that's how I was taught it in American public school.

A lot of monied families got where they are through scams, usually made possible through more family money or connections. One that we are still seeing the political aftershocks of is the Teapot Dome Scandal. It started out as bribery in the 1920's and leaves us today in the Middle East.

The last grovernment that tried to use genetics to modify it's society of illness didn't have the technology, so they just resorted to gassing millions of the "unfit" to protect the chosen.

The Nazis were just more vigorously implementing a eugenics concept that originated in the U.S., where compulary sterilization was carried out on over 60,000 people. (The SCOTUS okayed this in Buck v. Bell, which has not been overturned.)

If you kill the baby before birth because of a genetic code defect, it is the same result. Just less gas and mass of bodies, but the results are the same.

You can't kill a "baby" before it's born., because it's not a "baby" yet. It's a fetus, embryo, blastocyst, or zygote. The distinction is very important: selecting which of several embryos to implant in order to avoid creating a person with a genetic disorder, is not the same as killing a three month old infant.

If the "lives" program were implemented as suggested by Rahm Emanuel then I would not have two wonderful children.

Sorry, you lost me here. Are you suggesting that Rahm Emanuel has been advocating some sort of forced eugenics program? Link, please?

Did they have downs? Nope, just similar gene issues, but mentally they are higher than their peers.

What the heck is "similar" to trisomy 21? Down's syndrome is not a subtle genetic alteration, it's a whole extra copy of a chromosome.

But I guess he wouldn't want to teach them to take responsiblities for their actions... no reason to teach that anymore.

Aborting a fetus rather than having a baby you can't properly care for, is responsible behavior. (Of course using contraception and not getting pregnant in the first place is even more responsible.)

Of course he is. He's a vain asshole with totalitarian tendencies who cries at the slightest whiff of criticism. He got his piece of the pie already, so as far as he's concerned everyone else can go to hell. Funny how the cries of "Fascism!" from the left died down after The Messiah was elected, even though he's actually accelerated the rate at which government and big business are getting in bed together. Makes me wonder if any Democrat even understands what Fascism is. Well here's a hint: it's not just a ruler who imposes his will on you. It's an entire system of government where the private sector retains ownership of it's property, but it is entirely directed by the state. Sound familiar? Hell, Hitler DID credit American Progressive "scientists" and politicians as the basis for his ghastly genetic superiority philosophy. And American Progressives are on record for admiring Hitler for having the balls to push his vision forward. Fascists and Progressives: more alike than they want you to know.

http://hnn.us/articles/1796.html

Obama's Director of the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy (a.k.a. Obama's science czar) John Holdren, for one.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/More-Holdren-Traditional-family-is-obsolete-50807107.html

http://www.google.com/search?q=american+eugenics+movement

In particular, read http://hnn.us/articles/1796.html and note the following paragraph:

"In an America demographically reeling from immigration upheaval and torn by post-Reconstruction chaos, race conflict was everywhere in the early twentieth century. Elitists, utopians and so-called "progressives" fused their smoldering race fears and class bias with their desire to make a better world. They reinvented Galton's eugenics into a repressive and racist ideology. The intent: populate the earth with vastly more of their own socio-economic and biological kind--and less or none of everyone else."

This is why I want to puke when someone tells me they are a "progressive." Fucking racist pig is what they are.

You call them unarmed civilians, we call them "collateral damage."

In order for it to be collateral damage, it has to be, well, collateral. Do you actually read what you're replying to? Let me point you to the part you missed: purposefully targeting ... unarmed civilians. As far as your cute line about war = terrorism, did you miss the memo regarding it being illegal to kill noncombatants in modern day wars? Unless you were just being an ass, here, educate yourself: http://hnn.us/articles/1345.html

They may have just fubared their legalese? Here is another curious find.

http://hnn.us/blogs/archives/4/2004/1/

But I have a better link.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald's_Restaurants

That is the theory we are given but I live in the South. The South became Republican as the old Yellow Dog Democrats started dying out. In the main those old guys never forgave the Republicans for Lincoln's "war Crimes", they just finally died out. A few of the less radicalized younger ones eventually flipped parties, mostly due to Reagan not Nixon.

I live in the south, too. In Jesse Helms's constituency (where the schools were segregated by law until the '70s when the feds finally intervened). And your contention is a revisionist fantasy.

You know who was President when "the feds finally intervened"? Richard Milhous Nixon.

The states' rights movement which you describe is better characterized as "The Libertarian Movement" rather than "The Southern Strategy". It has waxed and waned in the Republican Party since the days of Goldwater in the 1950s and 1960s, even before desegregation became as much of an issue at the federal level. It did not really take hold until the 1980s, and since the late 1990s, the Democrats have since co-opted the movement with a certain amount of success.

...How does Intel plan to compete against $6 Arm chips? A smart meter has no need for a 64bit, fat, power hungry, hot 3Ghz pc type chip with no peripherals builtin...

By buying up the main player in that market and either shutting them down or shoehorning 64bit, fat, power hungry, hot 3Ghz pc type chips with no built-in peripherals into the market niche formerly occupied by $6 Arm chips. Worked for Firestone and General Motors. Worked for Microsoft.

he thought religion was only good for stupid people

Hmm. I guess that's why George Washington penned over 100 prayers in his lifetime and spent quite a bit of time corresponding with clergymen.

http://hnn.us/articles/34925.html

Washington was a lot of things, but an atheist he was not. And it really doesn't matter anyway if he was or was not.

The Japanese used salt water in their water boarding which in and of itself can cause death. http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/60549.html After that if the stomach of the individual became too full of water they would either beat water out of the stomach or jump on the victim. From Wikipedia In this version, interrogation continued during the torture, with the interrogators beating the victim if he did not reply and the victim swallowing water if he opened his mouth to answer or breathe. When the victim could ingest no more water, the interrogators would beat or jump on his distended stomach.

Information that doesn't make it onto the Internet is still at risk. Historically important audio recordings from the 60s and 70s are badly decayed ("For those unfamiliar with the Nixon tapes, other than telephone conversations, they are extremely difficult to hear (in analog versions, and with the available equipment, it would take approximately 15 hours to transcribe one hour of Nixon's conversations)", and tapes of Creighton Abrams running the Vietnam War were barely playable).

Information that does make it into electronic form is still at risk. The Usenet archives from Dejanews.com almost got thrown away. The "deep web" is inaccessible to the Wayback Machine.

If you wanted something to last a thousand years, would you post it to Usenet (zillions of copies, all gone in fifty years when the backup tapes rot) or would you etch it onto an iridium tablet?

But... but it's O-ba-ma...

http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/57241.html
Yup this guy is also a strong drug warrior.
You thought Obama would be nice on drugs? Think again.

I'm fucking pissed off by the morons who keep cheering at every election for a candidate or the other. Oh yea, sure politics is screwed and power corrupts... but but, *this* guy, he's for real, you'll see.

We need change, but not political change. In politics, change means, more shit than before. Political change is for the worth.

Wake up, it's not about the people in charge, the problems lie with the incentives and yes, democracy itself.

Actually that's probably because the president has very little to do with the economy. Congress passes the budget, the president just signs or vetoes it. The president can make suggestions, but although he may take the blame or the credit for the state of the economy, he has very little to do with it.

I found this article interesting regarding the history of where Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae came from. Written in 2003, it's notes that, "Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are the only two Fortune 500 companies that are not required to inform the public about any financial difficulties that they may be having."

Rather prophetically, the author adds:

In the event that there was some sort of financial collapse within either of these companies, U.S. taxpayers could be held responsible for hundreds of billions of dollars in outstanding debts. A recent investigation by the Justice Department and the SEC into the accounting practices at Freddie Mac revealed accounting errors in the amount of 4.5 to 4.7 billion dollars and resulted in the termination of three of the company's top executives. Ongoing investigations by Congress, particular the House Finance Services subcommittee that oversees the activity of GSEs, will determine the future role of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the secondary mortgage market that they dominate.

However, members of both parties on the House Financial Services Committee have had a cozy relationship with Freddie and Fannie lobbyists who strived to keep regulation at bay. It's somewhat ironic that congress and opposing political parties heap ALL the blame on the incumbent president while they quietly go on filling THEIR coffers for their next re-election campaign. If anyone is the "little man behind the curtain" it's more our elected representatives than anyone else.

I'll leave out really common feeds and a few that won't interest many people, but here are the top 25% or so of my feeds:

A Gentleman's C http://gentlemansc.blogspot.com/rss.xml
An Angry Professor gripes about stuff

Armchair Generalist http://armchairgeneralist.typepad.com/my_weblog/index.rdf
Blog by a moderate-left military analyst

Arts & Letters Daily http://aldaily.com/rss/rss.xml
Three interesting links every day (actually usually one or two INTERESTING ones)

Breaking News (History News Network) http://hnn.us/roundup/rss_full/41.xml
Stories about History with a slight conservative bias

Consumerist http://consumerist.com/excerpts.xml
Shoppers bite back.

indexed http://indexed.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss
Note card humor, usually featuring Venn diagrams

Inside Higher Ed http://feeds.feedburner.com/insidehighered/OxmP
Stories from academe, with fairly grumpy comments

Junk Charts http://junkcharts.typepad.com/junk_charts/rss.xml
Redraws charts to make data analysis easier

Obscure Store and Reading Room http://obscurestore.typepad.com/obscure_store_and_reading/index.rdf
Well-known wierd news site with comments

PostSecret http://postsecret.blogspot.com/rss.xml
Secrets on postcards, every Sunday. Fascinating.

ReelViews New Reviews http://feeds.feedburner.com/ReelviewsNewReviews
My favorite currently-active film reviewer

SCOTUSblog http://www.scotusblog.com/movabletype/index.xml
Get the skinny on the latest Supreme Court actions

Slashfood http://www.slashfood.com/rss.xml
Because I love food

Slate Magazine http://www.slate.com/rss/
The best of the online political mags; lefty bias

Spluch http://spluch.blogspot.com/rss.xml
Always something interesting. Similar material to the extremely popular Boing Boing, but with fewer posts per day.

The Monkey Cage http://www.themonkeycage.org/atom.xml
Analysis from political scientists. Much better than the usual partisan approach.

The Onion http://feeds.theonion.com/theonion/daily
Most of the humor is usually contained in the headlines, so I seldom read more

He's likely referring to this: http://hnn.us/articles/48916.html (Not making any claims as to how accurate or not that is, just happened to have the link in my history.)

To clue you in, dufus...

especially on the subject of Russia

I also voted for Bush â" twice

[RE: worst presidency to date.] Only in jest they are â" and only the most partisan Lefties among them.

[RE: Apathy] No, only you, dear. Only you and your band of fellow Illiberals[sic, or ad hominem]...

"Uncertainty" according to whose standard?

It's pretty easy when you look at the vote tallies for your county and see that the candidate you voted for is showing zero votes. That makes it obvious that the original count is wrong. It's difficult to spot shifting vote numbers once the numbers get higher, which is why we need UN election oversight. This is a measure we insist on in other countries but yet refuse in our own. Uncertainty is when you vote is being counted by black box machines made by a company that employs know felons in key management areas. Strangely the people put in power by this voting system, don't want the system to change, funny that. True election reform which would break us out of our dysfunctional two party system, such as approval voting or instant runoff voting will never pass through a legislature put in power by a strong two party system. Uncertainty is when 56% of the population doesn't even show up to vote, because they do not feel represented by either of the two available choices.

"Godwin's Law is bullshit. If one picks comparable attributes it is perfectly reasonable to compare people and governments to Hitler and the Nazi movement."

What rhetorical purpose does comparing 1930s Nazi Germany with the USA in 2000 fulfill? You can find similarities between any two random civilizations, unless you are comparing very specific societal effects, making generalizations are useless beyond throwing firebombs into a conversation.

"The fallacy YOU'RE engaging in is: "Any comparison of right-wing American political leaders to Hitler, Nazis, or the Nazi government is invalid."

No, making the comparison to predict the future is invalid and, above all else, inflammatory.

"You hold this opinion because you're a conservative and American conservatives are in complete denial about the history of their political affiliation."

What an awful assumption. I'm not defending Bush, he's a terrible president, but he isn't significantly worse than some others we have had. The hyperbole isn't helpful in getting rid of him, if anything it lost Kerry the last election.

"American right-wingers have opposed every single civil rights measure in American history, from Miranda to birth control."

Are you for real?
http://hnn.us/articles/5331.html

"So what happens when the law enforcers simply ignore the laws, the way Bush does?"

They get smacked down by the supreme court. Conservatives complain the supreme court is too liberal, liberals complain it's too conservative. That means it works just fine.

"Here's a scenario for you: The President decides he wants to push his agenda but he can't convince Congress to go along."

What do you mean, Congress is putting up a good show of a fight right now, then goes ahead and passes pretty much anything the President passes along. What does he need subterfuge for?

Bush believes that Saddam Hussein tried to assassinate his father in Kuwait, in 1993. More than anything else, Bush was looking for some way to pay Saddam back for that. My attitude is that it's basically a hillbilly family feud writ large.

http://hnn.us/articles/1000.html

See also Chavez; taking the farms from the white owners left a lot of land to work, and at gunpoint it gets worked quite poorly, lowering the amount of food for the populace.

America after World War Two was magnanimous; we had freed a billion people, almost completely for free (the Brits had a lend-lease thing going on) then we started pumping in millions for all the cities we'd just blown up

A link: Were Nazis Tortured in World War II?

America has never said it wants to attack, change the government and own another nation;

Another case where you should check your facts.

The president of Iran for example has spoken many times of using a nuke to wipe Israel off the planet (in direct violation of UN law) so many times, we're pretty sure he means it.

Another case where you should check your facts.

It's just so surreal, though; knowing the good we've done, the 40,000 men who died to clear France for example, the play-by-the-rules military that we have,

The war has gone on so long that rules are often becoming just suggestions, and it's getting worse.

Again, some facts might be useful. There are no absolutes, even for your favourite country.