"night by night, I stare straight through his gorgeous roof."
"By God! I will accept nothing which any and all cannot have as a counterpart on their own terms."

Somehow it is annoying to hear people talk that are so left wing they are completely delusional. Some guy talking about how this country is "Orwellian." Okay. Has he read the book? Human rights and the rule of law is going downhill in this country, but we are not exactly seeing journalists getting murdered in the street like is happening all the time in Russia. China also has a press that is vastly less free than ours. Yeah, our country is going in the wrong direction. Acknowledged.

When Paul Krugman is gunned down on the streets of New York and there is no investigation, then we are getting to "Orwellian." Until then, come up with some facts and specific policies on how to improve this country. Comparing the US, to, say, Liechtenstein, isn't going to work, because the US is the only superpower in the world, and with that comes a lot more responsibility than the small countries have.

If you don't have any ideas on how to improve the country, you can always go to the default rant and rage mode, like twenty millions bloggers and coffee shop talkers. When it comes to real things that can be changed, that's when you actually have to have some grasp of how this government works and some grasp of how the good people in the government (Congress) can make some decent changes. Maybe when Bush the destroyer gets out of there, things might improve.

For example, Congress is pushing to get health care for all children. That's a good thing. They passed an ethics reform bill that was better than nothing.

I'm reading about the Phillipines in the 1980's, where all you have is graft, corruption, indiscriminate murder of civilians, extreme poverty, no medical care. In other words, hell. We are not there yet.