The funny thing about the people who make up these stories is that they voted for a guy who sat for 7 minutes and read "My Pet Goat" after getting told that the US was attacked by bin Laden in the first place. Talk about hesitation.

Maybe it is time to wake up to the fact that gasoline will never be cheap again. Oil is a limited resource and energy is something all nations need more of all the time. It gets worse, because food production is energy intensive so food prices is linked to energy prices. And no people manage without food.

The nations that kick the oil dependency first and develops new energy resources fast will win in the long term. The US voter should wake up to the fact. You know, Jimmy Carter warned you already 30 years ago.

Do not disagree with your post, but one should add that on a long run, what is good for working-class people is also good for big-business. Without customers who have their own resources to buy products big business will fail. Without heatlhy, well-educated workers to hire big business will fail. Without systems and organisations to whistle blow and figth against corrupt and abusive managment, big business will fail.

So, instead of big business politicians versus working-class politicians, it is worse. The republicans are in the pocket of CEO's and major shareholders who are more interested in short term earnings and advantages, than what is good for the business environment just a decade or so down the road.

Its seems Hillary was and still is right on this point. The right-wing disinformation war seems to be about throwing as much mud on any politician which is not a part of the club and who is saying and doing rational things the voters like. For Clinton the mud was easy enough, Bill had a big appetite for women. You know like JFK and many other great presidents before him. The republican party wasted 40 million dollars of tax payers money to investigate Clinton's women and only came up with a dress with some stuff on it. Clinton was a good president even though he cheated on his wife and even though the right-wing obsession on taking the man instead of winning the argument.

The same of course is going on with Obama, where it seems all the GOP president candidates talk about (but don't show their own validated) birth certificate. Now they of course have a "news" channel to help them spread misinformation and lies about the politician that is not part of their club.

I don't have any issue with people who disagree with Clinton, Obama or any other democrat and who have different views on what is good policy. But the conspiracy that Hillary is talking about is a power game where right or wrong policy is no longer the point, only how to make any political opponent into some creep with a scary black face.

In Europe there is strong EU regulation to protect the consumers to make sure that you can use the same mobile phone whereever you travel in Europe and that ensure that it is easy for consumers to switch phone provider if they are not happy with service and price. Rember this when republicans start talking about how all regulations are "anti-business". Regulations are only anti-business in the sense that it makes it harder for corporations to abuse and milk their customers. But having good standards and a level playing field for competion while protecting the consumers will in the long run makes for more and happier customers and a more healthy marked place with good earnings for quality companies. Just look at the financial sector where lack of proper regulation gave record short term profits for banks but now have been replaced with a economy where both the consumers and the banks are hurting.

65% of the democrats voted against extending these three provisions, only 11% of the republicans. People who claim that democrats and republicans are equal on this or on many other policy issues are taking BS. Also, you might disagree with Obama on this, but Obama is very different than Bush thank God. On this particular topic, Bush was the one who first did these wiretaps illegally and then got congress to make it the law of the land. Obama has (wrongly many would say) decided to not change the law (i.e. let these provisions expire) at this moment in time, probably because Obama has enough on his plate and don't need to have fox news spending months taking about that Obama is a muslim who is weak on terror because he is not personally torturing prisioners at Gitmo.

Actually, you are giving the so-called Tea Party too much credit.

If you look at the voting numbers: Washington Post summary, you will notice that the republican leaders were 7 votes short. Of the republicans voting against, there were 12 republicans endorsed by the tea baggers. So in this respect you are correct. But if you look at the whole Tea Party fraction of the republican, i.e. all republican house represenativies endorsed by the tea drinkers, only 11% voted against. That is exactly the percentage of all the republicans that voted against extending the provisions of the patriot act.

This shows two things; the so-called tea party is just the republican party when it comes to this particular vote and probably on much else (even though the tea party candidates are maybe on average somewhere more on the extreme right). It seems that Tea Party is just a renaming of the Gay Old Party which voters for a good reason is a bit tired off. The other is that the democrat party, where 65% of the house representatives voted against this, is the party that care for your civil rights. The republicans leadership acknowledge as much by trying to blame the democrates by quotes like: "Democrats in Congress voted to deny their own administration's request for key weapons in the war on terror," .

In a very hypothetical thought experiments, if all the tea party endorsed candidates had failed against democrates, and the same voting pattern had taken place, there would have been 193 votes against (i.e. 45 more votes) and one would be quite close to a majority of the house representatives against extending this law.

No Nobel Peace Prize was handed out in 1948 the year Gandhi was shot. And it has been stated by several later committee members, for example Geir Lundestad who serves at the current secretary of the committee, that it is a shame Gandhi never got the prize. (The Nobel Prizes can only be handed out to living people).

Still, it is important to remember that a prize to Gandhi before WWII would have made Great Britan quite angry (Gandhi of course was fighting for Indian independence) and that handing the prize to Gandhi would not have been an easy decision when considering the political climate of the day. The Nobel prize was not handed out during WWII for natural reasons and Gandhi was killed in 1948.

A controversial Peace Prize at the time before WWII went to Carl von Ossietzky, another pacifist who was a whistleblower for the secret build-up of the German forces by Hitler. Of course the German government claimed that Ossietzky was just another spy who commited treason. Today the general view is that Gandhi is good and Hitler Germany is bad, but things were not as clear cut if you would discuss the matter in the 1930's with a "conservative" or a "liberal" person from Germany, England, USA, etc. No Peace prize is without political implication.

The US Federal Government played the central role to create todays internet with federal fundet research on ARPANET. And true visionaries in the Federal Government like Al Gore saw the potential of the open "information highway" and acted on it very early in the internets history. This makes the comment about the Fedral Governments "ineptitude" strange. It is hard to imagine how the "free market" on its own would have created the sucess story todays open "net neutral" internet is, both commercially and for education and information sharing even deep into many of the worlds worst dictatorships.

The US slashdoters should ditch the childish republican mantra that "the government is always the problem" and instead be proud of what the the US Federal Government has done for the advancement of the world with the development and realisation of the open internet. And the US Federal Government wouldnt be doing their job if they did not work on introducing and maintaining good regulation in this field as all the other fields of commerce. Good regulations are the foundation of a free market.

NY Times did this article on the Obama administration, which was not favourable or ment to get votes for Obama, but just stated the facts (in the sense the administration has not denied the story). So, in which respect is the NY Times doing "the same thing for the other side"?! Fox news is a pure propaganda branch for the republican party. The NY Times in this article (which was just cited by the Faux news article linked to) did the job the press is supposed to do: investigate and state the facts as they are and tell developments in the world that will influence the lifes of people. This "both sides are equally bad" bullshit is wrong and is a stupid excuse for the degradation of the press by Fox "news". Something is true and something is based on facts and some things are just spinned in a way to make a political party look good. There is a difference.

I see a lot of liberals (go to salon.com or huffingtonpost.com) complaining about this proposal from the Obama administration. When the Bush administration did wiretapping illegally (even with the lax requirements to get a judge to approve such wiretapping in retrospect when it comes to terrorist plots), most so-called republicans seemed to say that if you critise POTUS you are helping the terrorists. Or can you show me some conservative voice speaking loudly against it?

I do not see this relativism where liberals and conservatives are equally bad when it comes to protecting liberty. It seems to be something conservatives are saying to feel better about voting for republicans.