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Don't paint the GOP as the ones screaming about the Constitution, some of the Democrats are doing it as well, hell Kucinich thinks the President could be impeached over it.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/21/dennis-kucinich-obama-impeachment_n_838502.html

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0311/51595.html

Well we're in a deep recession and I guess the job cuts were broad-based, affecting lawyers too. And actually there are so many law school graduates standing outside your office door precisely because lawyers are paid so well in this country and they wanted a piece of it... just look at how much more a typical lawyer with 10 years of litigation experience makes, versus a software engineer with 10 years of coding experience.

Regarding the other big "parasitic" class (financial industry), see this excellence article -> How the servance became a predator. Don't let the HuffPo link turn you off, I originally saw this on CNBC or WSJ (or some other money website) a few years ago but I can't find the link to it.

This is why I term most of the Tea Party groups "Ree Tardiers" and the majority of Republicans "Retardicans" these days.

As evidenced by crap like this that they spew all the time, they clearly lack any semblance of higher brain functions.

The world stage? Is that like the world series where Americans play against other Americans and contentedly call it The World [Series]?

A scary number of Americans have absolutely zero notion of the world outside the U.S. If you're lucky, they may have heard of the country of U-rope and the city of England. Horribly, I'm not joking - there really are terrifying numbers of Americans like that.

There's a story I once read about a travel agent who got asked how much the airfare was to Hawaii from New York. When told the price, they then asked, "Would it be cheaper to just fly to Los Angeles and then take the train?"

That may sound like a joke but, working in Pennsylvania, a state that borders the Atlantic, telling the security guard in my building that it wasn't worth heading back to England for Thanksgiving, she told me, "Yeah, that's a mighty long drive."

A lot of Americans get their world views from Faux, sorry, Fox, News... A station that famously couldn't figure out where Iraq was on their infographics, marking it as Egypt instead. It's bad when the ones who're more up to date get their information from Glenn Beck who tells them it's all a Dinosaur/Muslim/Communist conspiracy.

This is a country where only 37% of the population even owns a passport (vs. 71% in the UK for comparrison).

This is by no means all Americans and, yes, I've picked the most horrifying examples. But, remember, when only 60% turn up to vote for the President (2000 election) and it's so close to 50:50 that the courts have to get involved, that implies it only takes 30% to vote in the guy who leads their foreign policy.

So, yes, many Americans are horrified by what's become of their reputation on the world stage. Many, many millions are. Unfortunately, there are a massive number who really have no concept of a world outside their borders and there are more than enough of them to keep voting in politicians who just make it worse but know how to pander to what they do care about.

You'd have to be on crack to make that kind of mistake.

indicates it was the Afghan policemen who took drugs and paid for the young dancing boys, not the contractors. In fact, as written, it was the contractors who trained the police to take drugs and hire dancing boys.

So you're suggesting that the newspaper's editors misunderstood their own article when giving it the headline

"Foreign contractors hired Afghan 'dancing boys', WikiLeaks cable reveals?

This is also not the first time DynCorp employees have been caught engaging in child sex slavery. And these "contractors" are performing functions such as training Afghan police and guarding US embassies that historically have been done by soldiers.

Yes, there is a long-standing tradition of organized child rape in Afghan culture. And we should be having nothing at all to do with it, and we should be arresting and throwing the book at the contractors that are.

Hello! What is this?! I responded to "whistleblower defense isn't going to fly [in court]" with something OBAMA'S OWN ADMINISTRATION speaker had concerns with: Bradley Manning's treatment now would affect the court case later [if he's ever able to stand trial].

I called it torture, and I'm not alone. Even the UN is investigating the government's treatment of Bradley Manning. Likewise, several journalists have taken Manning's treatment to task and called it 'torture' (Will Bunch, Daniel Ellsberg... the numbers are building). And [finally!] a congressman likened Manning's treatment to Abu Ghraib.

As for Manning's ability to stand trial, after being in solitary confinement for 8 mos+, and stripped naked at night most recently (ostensibly because he's a 'suicide threat' but doesn't qualify for a mental evaluation), Manning's reportedly catatonic — not fit for trial. That's FLAMEBAIT?! Hell no — at worst, it's "Off topic", but then again, so is this whole part of the thread.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-stager/who-elected-bill-gates_b_829456.html

Google operates fully within the tax law. It just so happens to be they paid very little in the US

Google is strongly critized and investigated for very "creative" tax avoidance structure and tactics, including massivly leveraging international tax loop holes in ways that are clearly against any intent of any tax law. To call this "operating fully within the tax law" doesn't really give the right perception, "tax loophole exploiting balancing act, possibly mostly on the right side of not being able to prove a criminal offence" is more like it.

You are right in that they so far have got away with it, so good and right for them you might say. But you are talking about the company that more than any others try to sell the "do no evil" slogan to us. Going to this extreme in using loopholes to avoid contributing anything to the societies they operate in (not just like any other Corp, decidedly more than most other Corps), is not "do no evil" in my book.

Don't worry, Congress is working on that now.

Why pick on Newt? He only cheats on his wives because he loves his country so much!

That list adds up to less than $14 million. Of the $388 million he raised. Less than 4%? Not really proving your point there.

The Return On Investment for political donations is amazing.
Here's the first relevant article I found while googling
There are plenty more articles that will say the same thing about companies across a wide spread of industries.

LoL! And Friss-Christensen -- stop, you're killing me!

Oh, wait. It's not really funny, because you actually are killing me (slowly). And in the meantime, you're killing 300,000 people every year who don't have the good luck of being born in the United States. Go read some real climate scientists. Go read as much climate science by legitimate scientists who are not climate science deniars as you have already read by climate "scientists" like Svensmark and Friis-Christensen who are in fact climate science deniars, and in the meantime,

SHUT

THE

FUCK

UP.

You are telling lies that are literally killing people. You are an accomplice to mass murder, you brainless waste of carbon.

How can these have any potential for misidentification?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/23/the-14-funniest-police-co_n_469662.html#s69305&title=The_Graphing_Paper

Here ya go.

This is an issue in a lot of places. Huffingtonpost did a story last year about the systems in the U.S. and how old they are.

You would think this is one of those places where the technology would be constantly updated, but not so.

That's nice and all, but this looks much less like a drone. Cute, when you don't consider the implications of a virtually invisible spy drone.

How about their belly buttons?

Avatar. James Cameron wrote the first draft in 1995

That early avatar stuff was available though - I read it way back then. So if copyright only lasted 14 years then someone else could have taken it and made their own Avatar movie using it.

They did. In 1995, the story of Avatar was relocated to North America, retitled Pocahontas, and filmed by Walt Disney Pictures. AOL Huffington Post has the details.

Actually, I'm going to go with the "big-time pop/rock star" ending (drug overdose) for Gaddafi. He seems to be on something most of the time he speaks, so an OD wouldn't be too far fetched.

Considering all of the US's "allies", I expect this country to bite the hand that fed Qaddafi. Where;s Cheney lauding his friends now?
Can't wait until Saudi Arabia turns considering all the payoffs to the "royal" family.

Just put this in perspective here... Let's take track records,

This is what rule of law has accomplished.

This is what rule of law asked these scumbags do

And this is in the plans, not to mention DoJ recommended firms to BoA to do this.

At this point I am wondering where is Thomas Jefferson when we need him now, and you honestly are thinking about the wellbeing of some teenager's personal on-line life? They don't even come close in term of scope! If I have to be a sacrifice for Anon in order to stump out the rampant corruption then so be it! I am Spartacus!

There's a difference between acting rationally for the long term versus the short term. Plus the difference between acting rationally for the betterment for the officers versus the shareholders or customers or employees.

Yes, there is, and that difference is not generally recognized by economists, particularly the disciples of Milton Friedman and overzealous "free marketeers" in general. Whether one calls the behavior "irrational" as istartedi and I call it, or a different kind of rationality or rationality from a different "viewpoint" as you call it, the real point is that the distinction is generally not being made at all in the field where it most needs to be, in economics, especially "economics" for the masses as seen on Sunday morning "news" opinion, campaign stumping and commentary programs.

The most visible spokespeople for the field of economics, the propagators of common "wisdom," haven't even gotten around to arguing such semantics, and they can't because aside from Krugman, Taleb, David Cay Johnston, Simon Johnson, Robert Reich and a few others, despite the mountain of evidence piling up since 15 September 2008 that irrationality has been widespread among the most wealthy actors in the US economy ever since Glass-Steagall was repealed by Gramm-Leech-Bliley exposing the "rational actor" model as a blatant error, more an inversion of reality than a simplification of the sort appropriate to a "scientific" model of reality, nevertheless most economists not only won't admit the obvious fact that this cornerstone of their libertardian world view is dead wrong, they won't even consider whether the "rational actor" assumption has significant limitations and flaws, for instance in collectives such as corporations in which individual decision-makers can have interests that may sometimes be in direct conflict with the presumed "rational" goals of the corporate collective. As a direct result of the obstinate refusal of Toohey-esque "think" tank "fellows" and "experts" from AEI, CEI, et al, who are paid not to know that the "rational actor" and other rosy assumptions of "mainstream" economics are wrong (because their real jobs are to be apologists for those very corporations that have all but destroyed the middle class), we have the spectacle of labor unions, the organizing tool of the working middle class, being scapegoated for what is 100% the fault of Fortune 500 financial institutions.

When we really think about it, we all know that no labor union had, nor has ever had, the power to cripple the economy this way because they have never had the power to re-write the rules by which the game is played. And yet we all know a few basic facts that suffice to show the basic nature of the problem: Wall Street was bailed out, and corporate GM was bailed out, but the old-GM stocks which comprise the totality of the pension plans of loyal, multi-decade GM workers are now penny stocks. This is morally wrong, and the direct result of economic common "wisdom" that is factually wrong.

STATE workers are suppose to be WORKING, not surfing. Now, would the liberals complain, if the state blocked the websites of Rush, Palin, Beck, Fox News

"If you are in the Capitol attempting to access the internet from a free wifi connection labeled "guest," you cannot access the site defendwisconsin.org.Huffington Post

STATE workers aren't using wireless "guest" APs to conduct their business. Although the whitelisting issue has discussed in other comments, your assumption that this situation only involed state workers so that the blocking was perfectly OK is deeply flawed. Guest internet access may not be a right, but censoring political content on a government sponsored guest network would still be a first amendment violation.

You're supposed to be working. Not doing political stuff. While it's a dick move, I rather doubt it's a first amendment violation or the end of the world (as is suggested by TFA).

"If you are in the Capitol attempting to access the internet from a free wifi connection labeled "guest," you cannot access the site defendwisconsin.org.Huffinton Post

What if you're not at work, but rather exercising your right to petition your government on your own time? Although the whitelisting issue has discussed in other comments, your assumption that this situation only involed people "at work" so that the blocking of "political stuff" was perfectly OK is deeply flawed. Guest internet access may not be a right, but censoring political content on a government sponsored guest network would still be a first amendment violation.

Yes, they're based in California -- unless it's tax time

A shame the same sort of loopholes can't be used for patents. "Your honor, my company doesn't have to pay royalties for using H.264 because we're based in Bermuda; which doesn't recognize software patents."

That amazon tribe was fake
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-grann/the-truth-about-the-lost_b_172910.html

Huh? Did you even read the article you just linked? It says the exact opposite of what you just said:

But that did not make the photographs "fakes" or a "hoax." The reason these tribes are classified as "uncontacted" is because they have retreated into the jungle and consciously avoided any interaction with settlers--an interaction that has frequently led to the extinction of Amazonian tribes.

You are not safer even when they are not necessarily ignorant.

That amazon tribe was fake http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-grann/the-truth-about-the-lost_b_172910.html

No, I would say it has more to do with things like consistently misidentifying scandal-plagued Republicans as Democrats, using footage from the wrong year showing CPAC delegates booing Ron Paul (which just coincidentally portrays him in a bad light) or studies showing that Fox viewers tend to be less well informed than viewers of other networks.

I wonder if this might play into future decisions by GM.

Cause you are very much confusing someone who consciously chose to be in the spotlight for their own ego-boosting and enjoyment - and someone who was been a victim of "sexual assault".

I'm not the troll here and my comment obviously hit a nerve with you. I believe I was clear enough on the point I was trying to make: Nir Rosen's tweets about Lara Logan vs seeing a woman who was brutally attacked. Seeing Steve Jobs hogging the spotlight vs seeing a sick man dying of cancer. My point, both people deserve privacy even if they are "celebrities".

The US Government? As of late, that has become a sort of pipe dream. We have revolutions and protests happening to try and secure more democratic ideals and oust the dictatorships and autocracies in Egypt, Iran, and several other prominent Arab/Muslim countries and states, but here in the US we are seizing innocent people's web sites and then pretending it didn't happen, enacting legislation that singles out groups of people by racial profiling them, have senators and governors trying to repeal health care reform, and are trying to find ways to change our laws and/or constitution to prohibit the free press and make it so they can't leak sensitive information anymore without facing jail time and possible treason charges, while we still have a "secret" government prison open at Guantanamo Bay holding prisoners against their will with no charges or due process, one of which died recently after 9 years of captivity, while we hold Bradley Manning in solitary confinement, possibly torturing him because he saw something wrong and decided it was horrible enough that the PEOPLE needed to know about it.

Where the fuck do I live again?

uh, did you you not realise that, while the various meme-variations based on it are satire, Bill O'Reilly did actually cite an inability to explain the tides as supporting evidence for religion? Here is the quote:

âoeIâ(TM)ll tell you why [religion is] not a scam, in my opinion. Tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You canâ(TM)t explain that. You canâ(TM)t explain why the tide goes in.â

I don't watch television, and I most especially do not watch Bill O'Reilly.

For the benefit of the doubt and for my sanity, I'll presume that you are just ignorant rather than deliberately trying to conceal the truth.

Funny how you paraphrase me. Great originality. You're right, though. I dislike O'Reilly enough that I was ignorant!

Now, being as you're an AC and you're probably trolling, I'll do the work for you since you were evidently far too lazy to bother using Google. Sure, I should've used it initially, but I was surprised that O'Reilly was even dumber than I thought--hence why I simply assumed that the meme, like most, was entirely satirical.

Here's a good link among many others related to O'Reilly's inability to explain the tides and related ideas in science. Since our AC friend who replied to me could only provide me with a quote (and not a link), I will redeem myself by providing it.

So yes, I was wrong. It wasn't entirely satirical; I simply assumed someone couldn't be so stupid as to state something so outlandish as to declare that the tides cannot be explained. Hence, that is why I assumed it was pure satire. Of course, it's easier to make assumptions about me being ignorant--and that's fine because I shouldn't have given O'Reilly the benefit of the doubt and assumed it was simply something taken out of context--but please do us all a favor and supply useful links instead of just quotes or cite your quotes by providing a link. It's much more educational and it doesn't waste as much of my time as having to go look up this rubbish myself.

Then again, I'd probably be posting as an AC, too, if I couldn't use Google well enough to find a link to what I was quoting. :)

I think the phrase is lost in translation. In Persian, it means "Down with Israel," rather than the idea of killing everyone there that everyone is led to think. It doesn't mean killing or wiping everyone out.

When Mousavi was running in the presidential election against Ahmadinejad, the latter was giving away free potatoes to the crowds. Mousavi's followers didn't like that, and started the rallying cry "Death to Potatoes."

You're way off-topic here. How does this relate to Stuxnet?

Besides, most experts say that Hamas has de-facto recognized Israel for years and supports a two-state solution. One senior official was quoted to have said "We want a divorce from the Jews, not to live closer to them... Israel has won, why can't they just leave us alone."

Money and in-kind contributions will flow both ways in the deal, Elop reiterated. Nokia will be contributing its Ovi mapping service and will be paying Microsoft royalties for the use of its software, as other manufacturers do. It will save money by not continuing development of its own software. The net benefit is still in the billions, he said.

So they're getting a payment from Microsoft up front but paying them royalties, giving them access to Nokia's mapping service, and killing off their own software department (or at least parts of it).

He said the decision to go with Windows Phone was unanimous in Nokia's senior management team. Nokia's board approved the deal Thursday night, a day ahead of the announcement in London.

So no hope of getting rid of this guy if all of the senior management was on board.

Muslims inside Egypt and out condemned that attack. Fortunately, such attacks are few and far between. Look at the aftermath, when terrorists attacked a church around Christmas, thousands of Muslim Egyptians attended church services in Egyptian churches, in order to serve as human shields in case of another attack. They held candlelight vigils outside and put crosses on their facebook pages as well.

Let's look to the last 2 weeks. A photo has been spreading all over Twitter of Egyptian Christians making a human chain to protect Muslims from police attack as they were praying in Tahrir square on Friday. On Sunday, Egyptian Muslims returned the favor, protecting them while they had prayer services. This is a great moment for Muslim-Christian unity in Egypt.

Dumbshit-Borg is an "asset", bought-out by corporate proxies, for the TLA's that want this crushed.

His splitting "OpenLeaks" is pure playbook from the US Gov plan to destroy WikiLeaks:

US Intelligence Planned to Destroy Wikileaks What! Past-tense?

CIA, State Department Apparently Acting on Plan to Destroy Wikileaks

The guy is a stooge, or a pawn. He serves the purposes of State and Corporate collusion in secrecy, to manage their globalist Empire.

You may be interested in this story. There, veterinarians attached titanium pegs to the leg bones of a cat that had lost its feet; they were designed to mimic deer antlers, and protruded through the skin in such a way that the skin would grow into a groove in the metal and, it was hoped, form a tight seal. I haven't heard any updates on this story, so hopefully the project has been successful and the cat hasn't been getting infections.

Looks like an active research area.

http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health/autism/autism-information.shtml
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/cancerMain.shtml
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2010/07/22/pregnant-women-advised-to-get-more-vitamin-d.aspx
http://www.iodine4health.com/

Both are involved with immune function in different ways. Adequate vitamin D is needed to make the brain's master antioxidant, glutathione. Adequate iodine helps excrete heavy metals. Both are involved with zapping cancer cells (it's said the average adult gets one cancer cell a day, but a good immune system deals with it). Vitamin D is essential to preventing pregnancy complications, including C-sections.

The US RDA for iodine may be way too low, especially considering how much bromine and fluorine kids are exposed to. The vitamin D RDA is also too low, even with being recently revised upward.

Eating fruits and vegetables also helps preventing lots of disease and is essential to good health.
    http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
    http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/diet-myths-the-food-pyramid-of-the-insane.html

One can tease out a lot of the individual nutritional and environmental causes in some cases of autism:
    "Autism Research: Breakthrough Discovery on the Causes of Autism"
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/autism-research-discovery_b_794967.html

Let's get that all right before arguing too much over other stuff and what the true risk/reward assessment is for otherwise healthy kids and vaccines. A focus on magic bullets may be leading us to miss the big picture here about optimal health, which is earned by eating right and a lot of good lifestyle choices.

If pediatricians educated parents more about nutrition, we'd probably have a lot healthier population, even without vaccines.
"Disease-Proof Your Child: Feeding Kids Right"
http://www.amazon.com/Disease-Proof-Your-Child-Feeding-Right/dp/0312338058
"A groundbreaking book that explains the connection between nutrition and disease prevention-showing parents how to keep their children healthy by feeding them right. Bombarded by the media with stories about childhood obesity and dangerous hormones, pesticides and additives in foods, and told that allergies, asthma, and ear infections are on the rise, parents have never been more concerned about what to feed children. In this invaluable resource, featuring easy-to prepare, tasty recipes, Dr. Joel Fuhrman explains how cutting edge nutritional science can be brought to the family table with amazing results. "

See also for how to break out of the junk food pleasure trap:
    http://drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx

After you get your level checked, you'll have to then decide what level is a good thing.

Here are four different recommendations for optimal levels in increasing order

IOM:
http://www.iom.edu/Reports/2010/Dietary-Reference-Intakes-for-Calcium-and-Vitamin-D/DRI-Values.aspx
>20 ng/mL (but their recommendations sort of imply not much more than that is important)

Dr. Fuhrman:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/vitamin_D_recommendations.aspx
35–55 ng/mL

Grassroots Health:
http://www.grassrootshealth.net/recommendation
40–60 ng/mL

Vitamin D Council:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
50–80 ng/mL (or higher for some specific conditions)

So, it's great to have a level. But even then there are disagreements about what is best.

Remember, parents have been warned heavily over the last decade or two to keep their kids out of the sun.

The vitamin D hpothesis easily explains stuff like the high rate (5X) of autism among Somali children or the high rate (9X) of schizophrenia among second generation Afro-Caribbeans in the UK.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-kirby/minneapolis-and-the-somal_b_143967.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2418996/
http://bjp.rcpsych.org/cgi/content/abstract/167/3/362

No doubt there are socieconomic issues at play in the disparity, but 5X and 9X?

Note that in the link you provide, the units were different (nmol/L which requires a higher level to be in the right range).

I'm still not following their logic to dismiss what they found: "Age-standardized means based on observed serum 25(OH)D concentrations were significantly (P http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2010/07/22/pregnant-women-advised-to-get-more-vitamin-d.aspx
"Please do not assume your levels are fine, as Drs. Hollis and Wagner found that over 87 percent of all newborns and over 67 percent of all mothers had vitamin D levels lower than 20 ng/ml, which is a severe deficiency state. As a result, the researchers recommended that all mothers optimize their vitamin D levels during pregnancy, especially in the winter months, to safeguard their babies' health. This finding could easily help to explain the disproportionately high numbers of poor outcomes among African American births, as deficiency is extremely common among people with darker skin colors."

However, another variable is how much vitamin D do people with different ethnicities or skin color need? So, even the general ranges above, are they appropriate for all ethnicities? Maybe people with darker skin have other adaptations to function well on less? So, there remains more to research about all this. But with that said, just look at how much sun people got 1000 years ago, and look at how much people get now, and considering how melanoma is one of the easiest to detect and treat cancers, how much sun or vitamin D supplements seems "conservative" considering the conditions human are adapted for? Pretty much no humans in the past spent all their lives in caves that I'm aware of (except maybe rich ones, but they probably got diseases of affluence like diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and so on).

We got hit by this ourselves with health issues with our kid (as well as a C-section, which turns out to also be at increased risk with vitamin D deficiency). We just naively followed all the advice to stay out of the sun, etc.. I actually asked our pediatrician if we should be giving vitamin D sup

I agree. I get a daily email news feed from Huff & Puff, but clicking on a link results in slow painful wait before any content appears on the screen (see what I mean here). The infusion of the AOL infrastructure resulting from this merger will probably improve their response time, but it will probably be at the expense of the content -- not that Huff & Puff was all that great to begin with.

You make some good points. Please also look into these links for approaches to improving autism situations to build on the dietary interventions you are already doing:
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/autism-research-discovery_b_794967.html
    http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health/autism/vit-D-theory-autism.shtml
    http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
   

"Given that autism has spiked all around the world, and it's unlikely to be solely due to just increased detection, the logical question is to ask what caused it."

Vitamin D defiency as well as some broader metabolic problems related to the modern diet and environmental exposure to toxins?
    http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health/autism/vit-D-theory-autism.shtml
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/autism-research-discovery_b_794967.html

He basically is of the position that the whole campaign to inoculate people against H1N1 is in and of itself a conspiracy.

No he isn't:

Also, I have never said there was a medical conspiracy. In fact, when Howard Dean asked me that, my response was "I wouldn't call it a conspiracy. But no, I don't think the A.M.A. and Big Pharma and Aetna and Dr. Frist's hospital chain all meet in a board room and cackle about keeping us sick. They meet on the golf course. (Just kidding.) Do pharmaceutical companies want to cure diabetes or do they want to sell diabetes drugs and equipment? Well, they sure do sell a lot these days, and the food companies are what make that possible. Read David Kessler's book about the deliberate way food companies use salt, fat and sugar as foodcrack to get people literally addicted to eating bad food and too much of it. Is that a conspiracy? Only if you define corporations putting profit ahead of human health as conspiracy. The fact that Americans will do anything to each other for money is not a conspiracy, it's a scandal.

I'd call it a scandal, too, as diabetes was cured over 4 years ago in a Toronto lab. I wonder what the profits on insulin are in the US.

I think a lot of people would be surprised to know that he's been on something of an anti-vaccination crusade, especially when it comes to flu shots. He basically is of the position that the whole campaign to inoculate people against H1N1 is in and of itself a conspiracy. He's adamant that you don't need vaccines if you eat right.

I believe you are overstating his position. If your immune system is weakened, get a flu shot. If you're a hypochondriac munchausens case, we'll, if it will shut you up, go ahead, get a shot. But I believe his point (speculating) is the vast majority of the healthy population doesn't need a flu vaccine. He certainly isn't boasting he's found the cause of autism.

snipped:

And it's precisely because I am a Darwinist that I fear the overuse of antibiotics, since that is what has allowed nasty killer bugs like MRSA to adapt so effectively that they are often resistant to any antibiotic we can throw at it. There are consequences to vaccines and antibiotics. Some people want to study that, and some, it seems, want to call off the debate.

I wouldn't stick Bill in with the pseudoscientists... he's a comedian and a talk show host... he wants a debate, not a paradigm shift.

So what about the suspected link here? An illness that kills less people than the regular flu gets global attention (and HUGE vaccine demand), and a vaccine is then hastily brought to market without proper testing and studies. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/01/flu-shot-narcolepsy-_n_816868.html So let's all just adopt a healthy dose of skepticism, and take a chill pill with those "big scare" illnesses. But I do agree that vaccination against measles and the likes is insanely important.

But nowhere have I seen any evidence whatsoever that Sarah Palin, or anyone else on the right wants to use force to "quell speech that she doesn't like".

It's amazing what you can manage to not see when you keep your eyes shut, isn't it?

Palin has suggested violence against Julian Assange, saying "Why was he not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders?". Several others pundits -- mostly on the right, though I wouldn't be surprised if hear the same nonsense were to come from one or two people on the left -- has made similar calls for violence against Assange, but Palin's is particularly delicious because she then went on to make use of the leaked data to criticize the Obama administration's policy towards Iran.

Also, "Back in 1996, when she first became mayor, Sarah Palin asked the city librarian if she would be all right with censoring library books should she be asked to do so." -- Anchorage Daily News

And when you broaden it to "anyone else on the right", it would be pretty amazing if you hadn't heard about the mass arrests at the 2004 Republican convention. Or about Rand Paul supporters stomping a protester's head.

But nowhere have I seen any evidence whatsoever that Sarah Palin, or anyone else on the right wants to use force to "quell speech that she doesn't like".

It's amazing what you can manage to not see when you keep your eyes shut, isn't it?

Palin has suggested violence against Julian Assange, saying "Why was he not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders?". Several others pundits -- mostly on the right, though I wouldn't be surprised if hear the same nonsense were to come from one or two people on the left -- has made similar calls for violence against Assange, but Palin's is particularly delicious because she then went on to make use of the leaked data to criticize the Obama administration's policy towards Iran.

Also, "Back in 1996, when she first became mayor, Sarah Palin asked the city librarian if she would be all right with censoring library books should she be asked to do so." -- Anchorage Daily News

And when you broaden it to "anyone else on the right", it would be pretty amazing if you hadn't heard about the mass arrests at the 2004 Republican convention. Or about Rand Paul supporters stomping a protester's head.

I don't believe it's actually censored in the U.S. Wikileaks is just not allowed to use Paypal, Visa, Mastercard, Amazon or Bank Of America. As the GP pointed out: If that's not politically motivated censorship, then I guess this isn't either.