I think a more accurate description of American politics is two corporate parties with minor differences on social issues. Neither party does a very good job of representing the interests of the general public. Trying to place the two parties along a single left/right axis is just a game played by the media to give the public the illusion that they have a choice, and that one of those choices matches their interests.

Maybe you didn't hear of Yemen? He also stepped up military operations in Pakistan, and increased CIA involvement in Somalia

From wikipedia

A bit more than just logistics.

You do remember that we invaded Iraq before Bush's second term right?

Both of them, of course.

Who are "they"? How do you know it's the same person/people? Do you know some of the members of anonymous personally? If so, please contact the FBI immediately for processing.

And compare her with the unshaved, tattooed man. I guess they're trying to promote the (educated) bad boy gets the girl stereotype.

So you would rather have no job than take a pay cut? I agree that $20 per hour is not great, but why not take the lower paying job until you can find something better?

I thought the message of LulzSec was "We're in it for the Lulz". I don't see any reason to doubt that they believe their own message.

There is also a case that could be made that he had a moral and legal obligation under international law (to which the US is subject), to expose the crimes he saw.

I think this question is already answered that most, if not all, of the information leaked by Manning should not have been secret. From what I've seen the information falls into basically two categories, either it's innocuous, or it reveals immoral and often criminal behaviour. Neither of these should have been kept secret.

Calling him a vigilante is quite a stretch since he didn't really punish anyone other than exposing what they were doing.

I would hope that preventing war crimes and exposing government wrongdoing is more than just his "cause of the week". Maybe you believe the things he exposed were just not that serious? In my opinion killing civilians should be taken very seriously, and it should be punished appropriately instead of covered up.

I don't really buy this argument. Yes, many businesses will round up the prices, so you might be paying up to 9 cents more than before for certain items. A few businesses might actually round down to compete, since the different between $1 at one store and $.9 dollars at another store is noticeable to the average customer. Obviously this will not have significant effect on big ticket items, a $500 TV is still $500 with or without the pennies. The place it could have more effect is on small items, for the average consumer, the best example is probably groceries. So let's say you buy 50 grocery items per week, and the price increased an average of 5 cents per item, that's $2.50 extra in your grocery bill. I would argue that's not that significant for most people. Taken over 1 year you pay about $130 than the previous year on groceries. The bottom line is that stores that try to jack up the price because of a change like this would likely be noticed by the customers. If you are suddenly paying 10-20% more for common items, you start to notice, and you might shop elsewhere.

The other side you have to look at are the advanatges. So one less digit means less change you have to carry in your pocket, less change in the cash register, less cost for the government to make the pennies and nickels, etc. So, IMO, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.

Redesigning the penny and nickel to be cheaper to product seems like a complicated solution to a simple problem. Just eliminate both pennies and nickels and drop the last digit of prices.

You are right, that changes 1 and 2 were pretty much all the extra security we needed after 9/11. All the extra TSA theatre is not about making us any more security, it's about making money for various corporations and for the politicians they own.

Here's a recent article, just to back up the claim that this is about making money for special interests, and not about catching bad guys or saving money for the general public.
http://www.republicreport.org/2012/mckeon-drone-lobby-speech/

The real goal of this is not to save money. The goal is to make money for the drone companies, and to score political points for the politician that can say they value national security.

As the other comment said, supporting SOPA was basically literal gold. So the politicians can choose between literal gold (campaign donations) and figurative political gold (in the form of popular support). I would much rather have my candidate acting based on popular support than potential campaign donations.

If you take out the "Ohmygod!" and "oh the horror!", this seems perfectly rational. Maybe I'm missing your point, but I think it's valuable to know that the tea party conservatives seem to be making the right decision on this issue. They are more concerned, on this specific issue, about their popular supporters (bloggers, etc) than about their financial/corporate supporters such as MPAA. And I greatly prefer this type of issue based reporting over the horse-race type reporting such as multi-page articles about whether Gingrich can catch up to Romney before the next caucus or whatever.