From the NBC/WSJ link you posted, this is the poll question they asked:

"There are many important issues in this presidential campaign. When it comes to deciding for whom you will vote for president, which one of the following is the single most important issue in deciding for whom you will vote? The economy. Social issues and values. Social Security and Medicare. Health care. The federal deficit. Foreign policy and the Middle East. Terrorism." If "all": "Well, if you had to choose the most important issue, which would you choose?"

Climate change, the drug war, and civil liberties aren't even options in the poll! You can't use a poll that doesn't allow these options to conclude that people don't care about these options.

It depends on whether he can exchange those Bitcoins for the same amount of Maker's Mark, at an exchange rate that takes into account the learning curve of Bitcoin and the recipient's calculation of the risk of holding Bitcoins.

Darwinism has a farcical and humorous good kind when discussing people's own stupidity removing them from the gene pool. 'Good Darwinism' is not intended to be a scientific theory.

Well, it's not Darwinism (at least not the good kind) when someone driving recklessly crashes into someone driving safely, and the increased speed results in the safe driver's death.

The way I think it is going to work - I'm not 100% sure - is that the Bitcoin network will not process transactions from two-factor addresses without having two ECDSA signatures from two separate keys. So there is no single point that a trojan could compromise to send payments.

Bitcoin enables a person, anywhere on Earth, to receive computer-based services from anyone anywhere on Earth, very quickly and with very little charged in transaction fees. Additionally you can send large amounts of money anywhere on Earth without incurring what banks charge for international wire transfer fees. I think it will also be good for micropayments - a website that wants to charge its visitors 15 cents doesn't have any good way of doing this presently without being destroyed by credit card fees.

A stolen briefcase can be broken into, a stolen encrypted Bitcoin wallet file with a secure password cannot. Additionally, Bitcoin is supposed to be introducing two-factor authentication soon, which would, for example, require keys from both a smartphone and a PC to decrypt a wallet and send Bitcoin payments. While it's possible and feasible to make and distribute a trojan that could infect a computer and both copy the wallet.dat file and log keystrokes to determine the wallet password, it would be incredibly harder to do so on both of a single person's computer and smartphone. Whether that is easy enough and safe enough for the masses remains to be seen.

The difference is that most of the reasons that people have for accepting silver/gold certificates instead of actual gold/silver coins do not apply to Bitcoin. Bitcoin can be carried anywhere (and sent anywhere in the world) without a weight or volume problem. You don't have to physically travel to a Treasury office to redeem Bitcoin certificates for real Bitcoins. You don't have to worry about counterfeit Bitcoins as you might with gold/silver coins. With a moderate amount of encryption and backup you don't have to worry about them being stolen from your computer.

Stock offers from legitimate successful companies also benefit creators and early adopters. By your definition, does that make all stock offers scams?

With Bitcoin, the owner encrypts his wallet so the police can't use it, and the owner has a backup copy somewhere else where he can retrieve it whenever he's free. Or his trusted friend retrieves it.

If you give the average investor the choice between a) freedom, capitalism, and free markets, and b) higher profits through having the law favor his investments, he will choose B every time.

Interest on loans does not require an inflationary money system. The money that a person pays as interest either reduces his future spending or will require him to sell more of the future goods/services he produces.

Bitcoin will always have a value less than infinity, and therefore there will always be some fraction of Bitcoin you can take to represent any value to send to someone, and thus Bitcoin will still "work." A deflationary money system does mean that people ought to adjust their prices accordingly, but this is easier than in the past due to fast modern communications and a liquid exchange market.

How does that work with real estate? Say someone owns a lot of properties, and charges people rent for people to live there, and keeps spending less than he takes in from rent, and buys more land with the difference. Will he then someday own all the land in the world? And thus can we say that the system of land ownership and rent is doomed to fail? No, because first, he won't live that long, and second, the value of the remaining land will increase as its supply decreases. (And third, a human being will find things to spend his money on sometime before he owns all the land in the world.) In the same way, if one person's Bitcoin wealth is great and increasing, it becomes asymptotically hard for him to gain all the Bitcoins in the world, because the value of remaining Bitcoins will approach infinity.

I can't remember exactly where, but someone suggested that this might be a possibility on one of the Bitcoin forums. A day later, someone said in an IRC channel that they had been raided. I'm pretty sure they made it up based on the previous day's speculation. And now a website has picked up the IRC claim, and now Slashdot picks up that website's claim. As far as I can tell there's no backing that this supposed drug bust ever happened, but it's pyramiding into bigger and bigger news based on nothing.