While I agree about shits and sexual fetishes there are lots of times I don't agree with this. Like the right to speak your own opinion. I remember being at an antiwar protest and having a line of cops dressed in full riot gear with tear gas canister shooting rifles slung over their shoulders calling us faggots and un-American and all sorts of other colorful pejoratives. Now it seems to me that if they weren't dressed in the riot gear or acting in an official capacity they would have had the right to say those things. Sort of like with the Sarah Palin email fiasco. She doesn't have a right to conduct official business in a private manner. The line between person and role is very blurred and it's hard to really separate the two. I don't care about the sex life of someone in Minerals Management Services unless it becomes obvious that their sex life is being fed by the corporations he's trying to regulate.

This article, written in the 60s by Douglas Hofstadter sums it up perfectly. It's called "The Paranoid Style in American Politics". It's as relevant now as it was during the Cold War. This must be the best political essay I've ever read. http://karws.gso.uri.edu/jfk/conspiracy_theory/the_paranoid_mentality/the_paranoid_style.html

I think the party line is currently a battleground.

I think we need to go farther than that. If we want to actually be able to rise up against the govts that oppress up we the people need nuclear weapons. It should be as inalienable a right as having a shotgun or pistol.

My "car" is a LeMond and gets about 30 miles per egg sandwich and shot of espresso. Oh, it also adds about 50 units of happiness per mile. I work from home now, but I realized after I stopped going into an office that the thing I missed the most was my 30 mile a day commute. There's nothing like a vigorous bike ride to a.) get me focused, awake, and ready to work in the morning and b.) to really leave work at work, a hard day I'd just ride home 5 or 10 miles an hour faster, work off my aggression, and flood my head with happy chemicals.

How about Topsy the electrocuted elephant keeling over?

I always find it a little strange that people are willing to enslave, murder, and eat a cow but if someone tries to have sex with it they get all bent out of shape. I'm not into beastiality but I'm just saying, I'd rather be the victim of surprise interspecies sex than have my throat slit or be electricuted and then turned into kosher beef franks and filet mignons. We look at beastiality taboos as protecting animals... some of whom we will wind up killing and eating. This doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

miming.