Your reasoning is flawed. Doctors and hospitals accept medicare because medicare patients make up 1/3 or more of the patient pool. Saying no to them means they will receive exactly 0% of that potential revenue.

- Former Health Care Worker

This is why no one has sympathy for the RIAA. They’ve broken and flexed the rules to the point where they no longer deserve any respect.

It would be like Microsoft filing an anti-trust lawsuit against Google.

I don’t know where to start, so I’ll start with civil liberties. No one of either party has launched such an attack on the rule of law that Bush has. Nixon came close with his domestic spying, which drove both Republicans and Democrats to join in passing reforms to prevent that. Reforms Bush has ignored and violated.

9/11 was arson, Sean. Sorry. We were not attacked by a nation that could surrender to us, hence war against the nations of Afghanistan and Iraq cannot bring these criminals to justice. You may have noticed they’re still out there. We had the entire world on our side, and even those who wish us ill would not ban activities by Interpol to catch Bin Laden and his criminal gang. But my point is that we took our eye off the ball. Way off. We abandoned our search for the gang of murderers who killed 3,000 Americans, and instead wasted another 3,000 trying to occupy and subdue Iraq, which had nothing to do with the original crime. Bush has doubled our losses, plain and simple, and without getting the bad guy.

My quip about ‘undercutting the electorate’ was an intentional jab at Bush/Cheney’s divisive rhetoric; the use of such language is intended to vilify, not unite or to solve problems. Bush is supposed to represent the public. The president is the only government official who represents all of us. And the public wants out of this war. Our “leader” owes it to us to do the will of those who elected him, most of whom now disagree with this “surge”.

I sympathize with your yearning to “win” this war. But we can’t. Even with 542,000 troops, 60,000 dead, several hundred thousand injured and 12 years of trying we could not win in Vietnam. The same, sadly, is true of Iraq. We don’t even know who our enemy is, and if they stash their weapons and uniforms, they simply fade into the civilian population. This war is not winnable IMO.

You say “I have no compassion for those who want to make slaves of women, abuse children, and keep people uneducated and living in a state of poverty and barbarism—all in the name of religion.” But in the name of capitalism, 11 year old children work as slave labor in China, which Nixon, Reagan, both Bushes and American businesses built into a global superpower. True, Clinton also went along with the “free market” principle of giving China “most favored nation” status rather than standing up and insisting that American standards apply to those who sell to Americans. The Republicans have always fought against requiring our trading partners or American companies to insist on social and environmental rules in their search for ever cheaper goods. We have made profit the only goal of capitalism, and hence we endorse those abuses.

Your point about liberals not enforcing immigration is wrong. It is Bush who suspended the very program that would have alerted our FBI to students who held visas but didn’t attend classes. And funding for our intelligence agencies? Please. At the very top of both CIA and FBI we had traitors selling out every single secret to the enemy. Then, Bush himself exposed a top counterterrorism agent for his own pathetic goal of discrediting critics of his lies about yellowcake from Niger.

“You feel it’s right to pay someone off to leave you alone. That’s called extortion, banditry, robbery, and downright theft from their side. From the other side of the fence, it’s called appeasement.” I don’t care what you call it. We have nonmilitary resources that can help alleviate poverty, hunger and disease, reduce hatred and strife, increase education and defuse the wealth gap timebomb. It is far more cost effective than militarism.

We have spent $70,000 per Iraqi family so far, more than a lifetime income for all but the richest. I guarantee that even I could have produced better results with that kind of money. Within three months of the fall of Saddam, I would have had 100% Iraqi employment, a repaired infrastructure by month six, a peaceful country by one year. I’m oversimplifying, but the truth is, the carrot works better than the stick with desperate poverty stricken people.

Of course I agree with you about alternative energy and freeing ourselves from dependence on foreign oil. My home is 100% wind powered, I have always driven 4 cylinder cars and as soon as I can, will replace my current petrol-fired car with a hybrid or biodiesel.

Now, Sean, get some coffee, or maybe some soothing herbal tea.

I really wish I was joking.