Long distance runners do seem to have issues with heart disease, but it's probably due to all the "carbo-loading" they like to do, rather than the running itself.

Where I live the Tea Party protesters were carrying signs saying "Keep government off my Medicare". It's hard to take that very seriously.

I though Facebook was incorporated in Ireland? EU courts might have something to say about this.

I dunno. A lot of the tea party is retired. Try cutting social security and medicare and see how fast they abandon "limited federal government".

I'm a boomer, and I agree with him on both points. Means-test SS. Bring the troops home. I paid into SS all my life. And the politicians already spent it! How is it fair to demand the next generation pay for my retirement if I have other resources to draw upon?

That's the way it works for you or me, but that's not actually how it works when you can print the money. There is no connection now between how much they bring in, and how much they spend. Whatever they don't get in taxes, they just borrow or print to make up the difference. I agree that they need to stop spending. Let's start by cutting the defense budget in half. See how many republicans you can get to agree to that.

I think they call it "Student loans"

I used to believe this too. The republicans call it "Starving the beast". It doesn't work. There is no connection between taxes and spending that I can see.

This is a common misconception. The first amendment to the US constitution applies to the government of the United States. The 14th Amendment then extended that to the state governments also. One doesn't have to be a US citizen to benefit from this.

Same for health care. There is a pretty obvious pattern here.

Follow that train of thought another step, though. Companies were only able to do it because there was a large pool of college graduates to choose from. If that pool wasn't available, they would have to change their minimum requirements to something more like what the job actually requires, or they wouldn't be able to fill those positions. I bet a lot of companies do this because it is an easy filter to cut down on the pool of applicants they have to look at.

I'm guessing that most people would have chosen legal methods back in the day if they were available and inexpensive and easy to use.. Now that the piracy infrastructure is in place, and people are used to using it, it is going to be extremely difficult to get that genie back into the bottle.

Not necessarily. If what you are using has a practical use, then it has value even if nobody else wants it in the future.

One slight correction, the Democratic party didn't vote in Robert Byrd, the voters of West Virginia did. Carry on.

You appear to be saying that raising the minimum wage has no bad effects, only good ones. So, you could propose raising the minimum wage to $10 an hour, say, and the effects would be all good. Why not $20 per hour? Why not $50 per hour? Why not $100 per hour? Is there some number which is too high, and what would the downside be? Wages are the price of labor, and the price is normally set by supply and demand, just like other prices. Does having the government set prices have any bad effects, and what might they be? Discuss.