They don't profess Obama was born elsewhere - they just leave it as a "question".

They get even more subtle than that. When Pew Research revealed 18% of Americans believed Obama was Muslim, most networks quoted the article verbatim. The local Fox News anchor, however, opened with this: "Do you believe our president is Muslim? If so, there are a lot of people who agree with you."

It should have been Assange, but Time magazine caved to government pressure! Now we attack! Our forces will go to the newsstands and look at Time magazine thousands of times per second, until there are no photons left for anyone else!

Since I spend a lot of time jumping on step pyramids and being chased by snakes, I was going to bring the same lawsuit against the makers of QBert.

If our government wants to protect its diplomatic efforts, then DON'T ACCRUE the risk in the first place. Then you don't have to fear the leaks.

I think putting this fear in the hearts of the powerful is the point of, and value of, Wikileaks. Regardless of whether they've broken a world-changing story so far, they've produced a chilling effect on corruption.

I was going to suggest the same possibility. Mod parent up.

If a deity exists, clearly they are just as likely to be made of arsenic.

Indeed, my experience with organized religion has convinced me that God is most likely poisonous.

Whoops - between stars.

The High Frontier, Redux - Covers the true scale of the distance between planets, and the energy requirements of going between them. He estimates that sending an Apollo-sized capsule to the nearest star would take as much energy as is produced on Earth in a year.

"People with stronger party affiliation, conservative political views, and greater interest in politics proved more likely to click on articles with opposing views, according to the Ohio State study. 'It appears that people with these characteristics are more confident in their views and so they’re more inclined to at least take a quick look at the counterarguments,' Knobloch-Westerwick noted.

I'm willing to believe they're confident in their views, but I doubt they look at the counterarguments because they intend to consider them. Also, conservatives are much more monolithic in their opinions. Read one conservative blog's opinion on an issue, and you know what most conservatives are going to think, and why.

I think it's like Einstein's "God does not play dice," or everyone else's "Thank God it's Friday." It's just a turn of speech, and doesn't imply belief in God. Furthermore, when someone like E.O. Wilson professes belief in a god, everyone assumes he means Jehovah -- but "God" is a slippery word, even when you're using it in earnest.

It may create jobs, but they do not create value

Hear, hear. This is an example of the Broken Window fallacy. If someone breaks a shopkeeper's window, that creates a job for the glassmaker, who then has money to spend on lunch, which is a job for the baker, and so on. However, this ignores the lost opportunity of having the shopkeeper spend that money on something he actually wanted. I've heard people argue that World War II was good for the economy, and I think that's a more obvious version of this fallacy. Everyone had a job, but they were making bullets and bombs, which clearly don't help improve people's quality of life.

Strip mine the asteroid until it disappears.

Because this job is going to take not only an oil driller, not only a good oil driller, but the Best. Driller. In The WORLD .

And be sure not to contact him until a few hours before impact.

I'm liberal, and if you want decentralized government, it's okay by me. It is, in fact, a platform plank of the Green Party.

However, I live in Alabama, and when I hear someone talk about state's rights, it's usually because of poorly disguised resentment over racial integration. People say the Civil War was really about state's rights, but they're unable to name one important state right Alabama lost except for the right to own people. Though the slavery argument may not be correctly directed at you, it is not exactly a strawman argument.

If you want people to stop directing these arguments at you, you should loudly and clearly distance yourself from the modern cult of "conservatism" that claims to want limited government, but is glad to, for example, vote away a state's right to allow gay people to marry with the power of a Constitutional amendment.

I think it's wonderful that creationists are interested in teaching the controversy. Organized religion has made great strides. It's wonderful that they've put their ideas on a level playing field with the competition. There was a time when they would have suppressed any idea that conflicted with their dogma. So. They can teach the controversy in school, and evolutionary scientists can teach the controversy at church. Is that how this will work?