And Americans were feigning belief? Why that would be un-American.

"Well I think... I think I believe... no offense to anybody out there...but that’s how I was raised and I believe... it's great that Americans are able to choose one way or the other...."

Is that really a demagogue to you? People like to see what they want and overreact how they want. Bill Clinton becomes a racist for saying Obama's anti-Iraq speech bit was a "fairy tale". Whole Earths head becomes the same as Rush Limbaugh for writing an op-ed, requiring a boycott of a health food chain (imagine Rush promoting health food?)

And no, she wasn't fired for refusing to do swimsuit shots - the org even paid for a breast job for her - she was fired because she would not coordinate her appearances with the committee. Seems dumb of her, but it's probably more about the attacks she got and her subsequent decision to speak for the National Organization on Marriage without clearance - the relationship was strained by that point.

How awful - someone who holds a different opinion but willing to allow people to do what they want.

How terrible - a Christian that's comfortable shooting a home sex movie. So on one hand liberals hate Christians for being too prudish, and then on the other hand they hate them when they're too wild. Hard pleasing liberals.

Of course we don't know how this tape surfaced, but the bigger issue was that the pageant was upset that Prejean wasn't 100% in the tank for gay marriage (as if that was a question that should have been asked when the pageant is all about 1850's sexual values - even though the host Perez Hilton likes posting naked celebrity paparazzi shots such as the famous Britney snatch piece), and then disqualify her for some basic swimsuit shots. What a bunch of bozos.

Capitalism is a mechanism for flow of goods. It may be more efficient in some respects than feudal estates, but it can also be be draconian, usurous, evil.

Socialism as a force for collective good can also use capitalism as an underlying substrate. There is no reason that capitalism cannot be a means for improving the efficiency of socialist ideals. Socialism does not dictate the method of sharing. It simply advocates the position of combining resources. I can take off the day to help you build your house, or I can pay someone else to do it or I can give you materials to do it. The resources of time & money & resources are all fungible - the intent is the overlying issue.

Liberals get caught up in the nature of capitalism and treat it anthropomorphically. Capitalism is simply a network, just like the internet. You can provide free services, you can make a ridiculous margin. It's all how you present your services over the network.

Just like we move network technologies from 56kbps modems to 5 Megabit DSL, or GPRS to 3G speeds, we also upgrade our capitalistic networks. China is a high bandwidth center, but just as people once thought 28.8Kbps was the peak over telephone, the algorithms can be refined to do more with less. We have a relationship between our management, marketing, production and distribution. It needs to increase in speed and in size, though size is a funny thing - it doesn't have to be monolithic - as something gets bigger, it can become more networked, more fractured and focused, especially if the communication between cells improves. Once upon a time, buildings were only a few stories tall in part because the communications between floors was so poor. Now we can have organizations completely dispersed, a few people on each continent. Right-sizing is still important - critical mass is important for various operations. Vital marketing & advertising is neglected at the price of sales. Bogging down valuable employees with tedious unproductive tasks is the same as taking a critical financial data center and devoting it to calculating pi. We're not perfect at balancing resources, but we're getting better.

Security is not assured by any means in the capital network, just as it isn't in the blogosphere/internets. While improved speed for transactions can be a very good thing - the venture capital to drive innovation in America depends on it, and it's proved a success - it can also suffer from spam, viruses, phishing, malicious attacks, network operators gaming the system. In some ways we take security more seriously on the internet than at a certain level in our banks and financial houses, but then again, we have the US government intercepting all our internet traffic and sifting through it, so really it's a draw at the end of the day.

People worship capitalism just like people spend too much time on the internet. The real issue is where we use these tools. Of course they're used in a variety of ways - money to take vacations and build business and factories, internet to shop for books and to communicate ideas. Some people worship cars, some money, some their iPhone.

The real issue is simply there are people who manipulate and steal from all these systems. We need a balance of regulation and freedom in all capacities. But we've allowed a complete laissez-faire, "the business of government is business" attitude to trump all common sense. And I blame liberals running from a proper formulation of capitalism in their worldview almost as much as I blame conservatives for abandoning any workable realistic conception of where the capitalistic network fits in society. Once there was a conception of social good even by corporations. Now it's just a conception of rampant greed and profits, with no thought about the tracts of land between the racetracks to Wall Street and Silicon Valley, no holistic thought about how to maintain the infrastructure as a whole, not just individual pieces. We change the tires, we vacuum the insides, but the underbody is rusting. We've got a left-right conception of a complex system, one that's popped out of its national box into a global dependency, and yet we're living in a 50-year-old anachronism politically, philosophically.

As I last checked, he wasn't doing much I cared about except ferrying through a "health reform" process that codifies the high costs I want to get rid of. Oh wait, I didn't want that either. I guess he did stop prosecuting medical marijuana for states, after laughing at medical marijuana as a stoner thing a few months back. Slow progress. Someone was praising him for "getting us out of Iraq" - last I checked we still have 117,000 troops there with no plans on lowering that until after the elections sometime next year. But if you want to give him 4 years to show any progress, that's your right.

A loss of 5% is better for party growth than a loss of 15%. People feel the party is involved for every contest. As a friend of mine said, "You may kick my ass, but you'll be one tired motherfucker when you're finished." So be it.

Any other dumb comments?