READER COMMENT EXCERPTS

HOW GE SQUEEZED INTO THE BANK BAILOUT PARTY

-- I guess this explains MSNBC's talking heads' devotion to the Obama administration.

MORE BMI BS

-- BMI is obviously simplistic and inadequate. It not only does not account for mass, but it treats the weights of both genders the same, and fails to correct for skeletal structure. Healthy men weigh more than healthy women at the same height, as do individuals with a large skeletal structure as opposed to a slight one. - m

PLAN TO SPY ON EVERY CAR ON AMERICAN ROADS

-- Our political system has no way to value freedom. In a cost/benefit argument for a policy like this, human liberty, privacy, and dignity add up to exactly $0. - Boffin
-- Taxing by the mile is counterproductive for fuel savings. It provides a disincentive for more fuel efficient vehicles.

LIBERALS PUSHING THOUGHT CRIME BILL

-- As a potential victim of violent crime, I kind of like the idea of ultra -punishment for anyone who specifically picks me out of the tiny pool of very nice people wandering about in the general population - Joslin, Detroit

-- I thought love and hate were produced by the same limbic response but situated at different ends of a sliding scale, or perhaps even the same emotion: one holding to the object of desire and the other denied it. If you are denied the luxury of hate purely as an emotion, does this mean you can also be denied love for the thing "opposed" to it?

-- Lykken and others demonstrated experimentally that emotional arousal is undifferentiated---it's just arousal. Whether we perceive it as love, hate, fear, or desire depends on how we interpret the situation that produces the arousal. So the opposite of love is indifference, not hate. And the same is true of hate: the opposite is indifference; not arousal.

Even if we find it hard or impossible to interpret arousal as hate, that doesn't preclude our interpreting a similar level of arousal as love. Or vice versa. It seems to all depend on the kind of person we are, really. - Mairead

-- Some offenders are more equal than others.

-- If this administration or the Congress cared about gays they wouldn't be placating the defense of marriage crowd by basically going along with denying gays' freedom of association and marital rights.

-- TSA already considers prescience (or any thought for that matter) a crime.

-- Couple this law with preventive indefinite detention and we'll get a firsthand look at what it's like to be a Palestinian.

FIREFIGHTERS ARE NOT LAW CLERKS.

-- Wow, someone finally looks at the question of the actual test. I have been searching for something on the content, but can find only journalists blathering about the court decisions. Six years. We have lost perspective completely. What would happen if we required the journalists to take the test and then report their score along with their article? 98 out of 100 articles would be withdrawn. Same for any attorney billing time to this case.

POSTAL SERVICE WANTS TO CLOSE 3200 POST OFFICES:

-- Originally mail was delivered seven days a week. Religious types succeeded in eliminating Sunday mail. Eliminating Saturday mail, a day that precedes the already mailless Sunday, is a disaster. Perhaps we should just turn the mail over to the private sector and let the market figure things out.

AIR FRANCE 447 THEORIES

-- Since Boeing's future is based on a composite aircraft, it's highly unlikely this story will become mainstream.

ENTROPY UPDATE: JONAS BROTHER

-- This boy has a lot of confidence in his shelf life as a celebrity. Still, he does seem like a natural degeneration from Obama.

-- One big reason politics in America is so utterly detached from reality: we teach every child in every grade the history of the presidents - while ignoring/hiding the history of the sacrifices and struggles of the Working People who built the country.

If only Howard Zinn's People's History was read and taught in our classrooms (and Eugene Debs' biography and Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward and Equality), we'd have coming generations equipped with enough proper skepticism to sail us back to the wharf of reality.

Parents should teach from these books at home where schools ignore them.

EPHEMERA

-- As reality shows incrementally normalize sadism and sports worship stealthily normalizes the idea of competition as good, right, and necessary, so does gambling normalize and reinforce the idea of getting money for nothing, getting money for no work done.

All part of why Earthlings do not develop the elemental good sense to stop shoveling 99% of the money and power and freedom to a fraction few at the top of the brutally insane, and suicidal, and completely unnecessary human wealth power pyramid, robbing the rest of ourselves blind of our very quality of life and our chance to have a future.

WHO NEEDS DICK CHENEY? LET NPR DEFINE TORTURE

-- Listening to NPR is torture enough for me.


ASCAP WANTS TO BE PAID FOR WHEN YOU PLAY RINGTONES

-- Next step for the entertainment industry will be royalties demanded for when you could be listening or watching, but aren't.

-- In the UK, no one can play a radio in an office or shop anymore in case a customer overhears. A workplace such as a restaurant kitchen has to pay performance fees or switch off. Even farmers and animal breeders who play music for their livestock have been hit.

MEN EARN MORE THAN WOMEN EVEN IN MOST COMMON WOMEN

-- Women probably live longer due to a combination of biology and lifestyle choices that are less physically risky. While there's not much that can be done about biology, if men wanted to increase their life expectancy, they could undoubtedly improve it significantly by cutting back on the high-risk activities that they take part in more frequently than women do. -- Clever Elsie

-- Still women do have a longer life expectancy than men in almost every country in the world so what does that say about quality of life? In addition women achieve higher grades than men in school, what does that say about the equality of the education system from a male point of view? Its sweetness and light for men obviously. -- Matthew

MASSACHUSETTS HEALTHCARE PLAN FAILING

-- I am opposed to any type of National Healthcare Program being proposed by our Congress and President. It is just too costly for the American people. If it goes through, then I think every American citizen should demand that the healthcare plan offered and used by the Senators, Congressmen, President, and all federal government workers be scrapped and they should all be mandated to participate in the same mediocre healthcare plan they are mandating the rest of us to accept. Those who receive preferential treatment and care should not have the right to dictate to the rest of us what we should do without them having to do it themselves.

DON'T CALL ME LIZ

-- Is this what set off Lizzie Borden? Let's try to remember that the person offending her is a staffer for a lobbying firm representing the corporate criminals who rubbished the economy, and now want (and are getting), the taxpayers' money as a reward. Granted, the context of her emails makes it plain that Becton's motives were more about having to kiss the viceroy's rump before being allowed to kiss the king's than protecting the interests of the people. However, if all lobbyists got this kind of reception in all congressional offices, we might actually have a government of the people. - Gary Fee

ISRAEL

-- The very fact that no one here who posts a comment arguing against Israel can seemingly manage to avoid tossing around incendiary terms like 'Zionists' or 'Zionistas' is pretty revealing. There are level-headed people out there who can comprehend the reality of the fact that Israel is surrounded by hostile neighbors and does need to be concerned over its defense. Unbelievably some of those who are aware of this fact are not Zionists, and in fact not even Jews. That you folks can't wage a debate without straightaway launching into hysterical name calling has the unfortunate tendency to make the more levelheaded among us regard your views with perhaps just a little less seriousness than they might otherwise deserve to be given.

ATLANTA DESTROYING ALL PUBLIC HOUSING

-- When you're terribly exploited, you have to realize that some of your own are profiting from your predicament though they're decrying your demise. Unfortunately, what many Americans have been taught, that financial liquidity equates to moral superiority, turns out to be rich people's bullshit. If only they wouldn't insist on killing my buzz. - Onward & Upward

-- be don't need a white middle and upper class to exploit poor black people because now we have a black middle and upper class to do that. So much for the theory that economic success is the key to civilization's advance and success is capitalism. - Sacred Cows

ANTI-UNION FIAT HAS SORRY RECORD

-- So nice to see that the unions are not getting what they want this time around. Maybe now the taxpayers can stop taking care of the automakers and actually take care of our childrens education. They put themselves in the mess and they should have been the one to get themselves out of it without the taxpayers' money. They threaten strikes so they can get more money or benefits while the people who are actually buying their cars are the ones getting screwed due to outrageous prices they charge. About time someone took control. President Obama has not lied; he has stated from the start that this was a mess and it would take time to fix it. Maybe if Mr. Bush had actually done his job we would not have been in this mess in the first place.

ACLU SUES OVER TSA ABUSE OF RON PAUL ASSOCIATE

-- TSA agents knowingly abuse their power. Some of them are very nice and normal citizens doing their job but others just need to be either disciplined or simply fired for being idiots. Imagine if they themselves were being asked the same question? All this heightened security made sense to me until I saw a 90 year old white woman get searched for explosives. TSA needs to stop whinnying and step up their technology so they can get rid of half those people milking the government for benefits that hardworking citizens pay for. - Rick