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Actually, bikes are not as energy efficient as cars, as hard as that is to believe. Depending on diet, more energy is used to create the food you need to move 10 miles than the equivalent amount of gas to move a car 10 miles. http://www.lafn.org/~dave/trans/energy/bicycle-energy.html

http://www.edinformatics.com/investor_education/us_debt.htm

Where does it start skyrocketing? Reagan.

http://www.lafn.org/gvdc/Natl_Debt_Chart-2004.gif

Obama is spending to try stave off another Great Depression brought on by deregulation and shenanigans pulled by a previous administration that started 2 wars and tried to keep them off the books.

http://www.lafn.org/gvdc/Natl_Debt_Chart.html

the nation financially "challenged", to put it mildly

here are some numbers :
http://www.cedarcomm.com/~stevelm1/usdebt.htm
and
http://www.lafn.org/gvdc/Natl_Debt_Chart.html

maybe you should check your sources. In case you're feeling a bit lazy, I'll provide you with a few links:
http://www.cedarcomm.com/~stevelm1/usdebt.htm
and
http://www.lafn.org/gvdc/Natl_Debt_Chart.html

I'm justing waiting for one of the Republicans to man up and admit that it's time to get out of Iraq. That's something at least 60% of the electorate want (www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/current_events/the_war_in_iraq/iraq_troop_withdrawal). It should not be viewed as a partisan issue. The top two's support of Bush's Iraq policy is obstinate party loyalty and will be suicide in the general election.

Although the Republicans claim to be fiscally responsible, its just not the case. I still have trouble believing this chart. (www.lafn.org/politics/gvdc/Natl_Debt_Chart.html) It says to me that counterintuitively, the democrats are more fiscally responsible than the republicans. The Iraq war is waste of money. Our interests are not served by being there.

During the last debate, I noticed Romney and McCain smirking the whole time the 'nameless one' spoke. The 'nameless one' has some good ideas, but these two give ideas other than their own no credence. It's one of the flaws of Bush. Romney is a smart guy, but noone knows everything.

Huckabee has as much a shot as that other guy, so we don't need to talk about him.

I'll vote for "He whose name we shall not mention" while in the race. After that, I don't vote for anyone who wants to stay in Iraq.

NUT diet software
http://www.lafn.org/~av832/

ShrinkingMan
http://debain.org/software/shrinkingman/

Diet Monger Ass Kicker
http://freshmeat.net/projects/dmak/

Pydance
http://icculus.org/pyddr/
(dance dance revolution for Linux with dance pad support)

No you have no excuse to be a fat Linux looser. Soon you will be a regular Linux looser like everybody else, except of course you'd have very fast feet. :-)

I don't think that this is true in the US. Rail is about the same efficiency per passenger as a car: See here for my reference. Even the new Accela trains are less efficient than an automobile because they are so heavy. Freight is another matter.

Fair question. Let me educate you ;-)

One of the quick easy charts to give you the idea.

A much more detailed break down of the numbers.

Your welcome ;-)

I had only two things to say to those who will start an open recipe site. First: there is already pretty cool things done about that like a kind of recipe manager, with a pretty cool database on food nutrient (sadly, under console). There must be much of those things. Second, keep in mind to organise the whole thing to get the possibility of having a search for vegan, vegetarian, ovo-vegetarian, neo-vegetarian, and the sub-kind of not-so-hippie. They are about the last person to watch food for their health.

I've not attacked anyone's character, only learned from history.

When you make unsubstantiated claims that the "far left" is known for "ad hominem attacks", that is an ad-homimen attack in and of itself.

And there are Republicans who are pro-choice, but it does not mean that, broadly speaking, the Republican party does not take the opposite stance.
True, but not particularly relevant.

Yes, it is relevent. It demonstrates that your finding two examples of Democrats who favor stronger copyright/copy-protection does not mean that you can characterize the whole party by their positions. I thought that was clear.

I never wrote or implied the majority of people in California were in the entertainment industry. I stated it "is the center of the US Entertainment Industry." No reference was made to the porportion of Californians that are involved in it.

You wrote:

The State of California has long been considered a Democratic Party stronghold, and is the center of the US Entertainment Industry. Check which party won it the last several presidential elections.

That implies that the U.S. Entertainment Industry made up a large enough percentage of the California voting public to decide the election.

All the references I've read about the size of government are about the amount of programs the government is involved in. That includes regulating various things and social programs like welfare, social security, medicaid, headstart, etc.

I like those programs, despite the fact that I pay for them rather than directly benefit from them. To me, that's part of living in a civilized society. We don't let the aged, infirm, or impoverished simply die. The government is the perfect organization to spearhead such efforts because people don't have to listen to a religious sermon prior to getting the assistance that they need.

Learn from Reagan's mistake: He cut programs like Headstart and others that provided much-needed training to inner-city youth. The result? Crime in the inner-city skyrocketed when those kids saw no future for themselves.

Bush is headed down the same path, increasing corporate welfare while cutting entitlement programs. He's already given huge checks to the airline industry. Wants to donate drilling rights to federal land so that the oil companies can sell off the oil at a profit. He's revived the absurd "Star Wars" missile "shield" program -- despite the fact that any thinking human being knows that it could never work.

I saw Al Gore give a speech saying he was for small government in the last election. He made it a point about how he was for small government.

But not by cutting off medical care for seniors and Social Security. Gore's interest is in making government more efficient. Maybe the will of the American people will prevail next election and Gore will get a chance to do just that.

Funny, as Congress only had a Republican majority for the first time in quite a long time in '94 (year?.

I suggest you look at this chart. You will note that the largest increase in the national debt occurred under the Reagan/Bush administrations and that Clinton was reducing it long before Gingrich (and his mistress) came into power.

The greatest growth in the national debt occurred under Reagan (Rep.) (23.6% per year) followed by Ford (Rep.) (14.1% per year) and Bush (Rep.) (13.5% per year). Due to the Republican deficit spending, almost 25% of your federal tax dollars are servicing that debt. And much of that interest is paid to foreign debt holders, taking the money out of the U.S. economy.

The surplus was projected, it didn't exist yet.

Untrue. We had not had deficit spending since 1997.

Rather than continue to rehash things that were already written by the press, I will provide you with this piece by Bill Press from CNN's web site:

Bill Press: War does not justify Bush budget

February 11, 2002 Posted: 9:37 AM EST (1437 GMT)

By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services

WASHINGTON (Tribune Media Services) -- Be careful what you say about President Bush's 2003 budget. Its cover is a full-color representation of the American flag. The deliberate message is: You either support this budget or you're un-American.

That's just White House spin. Every president's budget is subject to criticism, and this one deserves its share. Shame on Bush for trying to use the flag and September 11 to justify more big government, a return to deficit spending, stealing from the Social Security surplus, permanent tax cuts for the rich and further fattening an already bloated Pentagon.

First, the raw numbers. President Bush is asking Congress for $2.1 trillion, a 9 percent increase in federal spending. He projects the government would run $106 billion in the red -- returning to deficit-spending for the first time since 1997. And he breaks a bipartisan pledge not to tap Social Security reserves for general spending. If President Clinton had proposed that budget, Republicans would denounce him as fiscally irresponsible.

There's something sinister here. Why is it that, out of office, Republicans preach smaller government, balanced budgets, no deficits and no stealing from Social Security -- and, once in office, they deliver just the opposite?

In fact, we've seen this Bush budget before. Only the dollars are different. Otherwise, it's a carbon copy of President Reagan's budget. He was the first to insist we could cut taxes, increase military spending and still have money left over. The result was economic disaster.

Under Reagan, annual deficits grew from $50 billion to $150 billion and the national debt soared from $900 billion to $2.9 trillion. Reaganomics produced 12 straight years of budget deficits that ended with Bill Clinton. Didn't we learn anything? Do we really want to go down that path again?

The biggest, and least defensible, part of the Bush budget is for military spending. He wants $396 billion for the Pentagon and the Department of Energy's nuclear weapons program. That is $45.5 billion above current levels, or an increase of 13 percent. It is also, reports the nonpartisan Center for Defense Information, a 15 percent increase over average spending during the Cold War, for a military that is one-third smaller than it was 10 years ago.

It would be one thing if that spending were tied to the war on terror. It's not. Most of the money goes to buy heavy new weapons systems -- ships, fighter planes, helicopters, armed vehicles -- that would have done nothing to prevent the terrorist attacks of September 11. How, for example, do the evil deeds of 19 guys with box cutters justify building three new fighter planes?

As Paul Krugman suggests in the New York Times, the motto of the Bush budget seems to be: "Leave no defense contractor behind."

Bush's military budget is all the more unacceptable because it does nothing to address the problem of waste in defense spending. According to a report issued last year by Business Executives for National Security, an astounding 70 percent of the defense budget is spent on overhead and infrastructure. Only 30 percent reaches our men and women in the field.

That inefficiency is even recognized in Bush's budget. Budget Director Mitch Daniels brags about the fact that this budget is the first one ever based on performance. In fact, it contains a chart ranking every federal agency on five different criteria, including financial management, human capital and competitive sourcing.

Agencies are awarded a green dot for good performance; a red dot for "serious flaws." The Pentagon gets five red dots, as bad as you can get -- but Bush still pours in another $45.5 billion. Go figure.

Even if you give Bush the benefit of the doubt, there's one other part of his budget that makes no sense. Let's admit, for the sake of argument, that the war on terror is so serious it merits more big spending, more big government, more big guns and more big deficits. Surely that means we should also take a second look at the tax cuts enacted last year, when it looked like surpluses would last forever.

Not according to George Bush. He not only refuses to delay his big tax cuts, he would make them permanent. Even in wartime, his rich friends come first.

In his budget, President Bush spends wildly but uses accounting tricks to mask how high the deficit really is. It could have been written by Enron.