Traditional American people? I didn't realize those inventions you mentioned were developed on reservations. The rest of us aren't usually more than a few generations removed from immigrants. This was especially true half a century or more ago when those technologies you listed were developed. Can you please cite the evidence where the overall economy, real wages, or standard-of-living of Americans has "collapsed" since 1965? Or where "fundamental technological innovation" has ceased? Increased economic prosperity for nations outside of the US and Western Europe may be a scary prospect to racists and xenophobes, but it's not necessarily the death knell for America.

And also less roads and schools and police and firemen and libraries and dams and bridges and courthouses and research grants and parks and ...

If you want to point to the US incarceration rate as an argument against national policy on drugs, then fine. Conflating it with a lack of civil liberties is ridiculous.

If it's such a small percentage, how does Rick Santorum win primary elections?

Not saying this couldn't happen, but central Florida is flat and humid and the closest tall buildings to that park are in Orlando, many miles away.

He's Al Gore 2.0.

Gingrich's speech was no more than pandering to the crowd ahead of the primary election. He's made bullshit promises in every state he's campaigned in so far. How does funding a new moon mission mesh with the Republican party's insistence on deep budget cuts on everything but military spending? Face it, we aren't going to the moon or Mars anytime soon. One side of the aisle wants to overspend on the military, the other wants to overspend on social programs. All the debate over taxes and discretionary spending is political theatre. Neither party is willing to make the sacrifices necessary to fix budgetary problems and neither really gives a damn about space exploration.

Coming up with an ingenious method of saving a $2 billion satellite rather than scrapping it and sending up a replacement is a sign of weakness?

Hasn't he appeared on The Simpsons more than once?

Yes, and look at the failure of nation-building the US did there. Oh, wait.

Where was the oil in Bosnia and Kosovo?

I thought this would be Google's chance to kill Firefox. Not many other search providers for Mozilla to run to. Microsoft can attempt to tie IE and Bing together and Google can tie Chrome and Google search. Firefox is left out in the cold to whither and die like Netscape. Probably not good for the consumer, but such is the way of things.

Obligatory XKCD. http://xkcd.com/936/

for an article about a Kindle Fire on fire.

This was a different design with an easier test objective. It's explained here: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/11/2400-miles-in-minutes-hypersonic-weapon-passes-easy-test/