In other words, reality has a liberal bias.

It always has and it always will.

Conservatives try desperately to hold onto the frozen past and maintain pointless, uninspired traditions, but it's all just one big pathetic time in a bottle obsession impeding all forward progress.

Religion has nothing to do with reality; it's nice to see more people are noticing that.

Patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels; it's nice to see more people are noticing that.

Thinking is good for you; it's nice to see some Americans are firing up their brains independent of our corrupt political duopoly that has reduced our public policy to a cash-and-carry fast food shack.

Politics often fails societies, although occasionally it has its moments of redemption.

Government can do good and bad; conservative ideologies help it fail spectacularly.

It will be nice to see how a fresh generation of youngsters reacts to the growing realization and eventual outrage at their elders for creating a cesspool of economic disparity, injustice, moneyed speech and limited opportunity so a few sociopaths could have all the marbles.

I hope the age of individualism puts the age of narcissistic greed in the guillotine it so truly deserves.

Conservatism has no logical or relevant place in a progressive society; it has proved its utter uselessness and irrelevancy repeatedly.

The only thing saving conservatism is fear of reality, fear of change and fear of others.

Fear and 1% tax cuts: Conservativism 2014.

Stop defending ISIS using false equivalency. Holding a person who has done nothing wrong, chaining, starving, beating, and waterboarding her is wrong. Beheading her for a video is wrong. Killing innocents for moolah? Ain't kosher.

Now, holding a likely suspect for long is not good, but it is not unusual in wartime, and ISIS announces it is at war. Torturing a man to keep him from hiding information of an impending attack or nor revealing the perps of a previous outrage is torture, and yet who would not try if the alternative was more slaughter of one's people or escape by the slaughterers?

No, ISIS is not the CIA -- though it uses their techniques. It is not the Marines at Gitmo though it guards people in formidable prisons without trials. Whatever ISIS is, it is worse than any nation's military, less humane than any nation's judiciary, and less interested in lives and faith than in getting cold cash. It is Murder Incorporated, bot Bush-Cheney, and the latter were terrible. But not equivalent. The latter were elected and repudiated afterward. No one praises them in public today. When we learned, we turned. That's how democratic people behave.

As for the thousands killed in Iraq, we have had trials for some wrongful deaths recently. The Blackwater trial is far too little a step, but when ISIS holds one, I will believe they are equivalent to our Army. Until then, they are intolerant, sexist, theocratic criminals. They are not us, they are Jihad, Incorporated.

Typos corrected: I am opposed to the death penalty, not because some people do not deserve it, but because to is nearly impossible to apply it without error - except in a handful of cases such as KSM. He is guilty and unrepentant. I understand the case for demanding respect for human rights, but just because the W administration tortured and got away with it we cannot ignore the nature of the terroristic crimes he's guilty of. I'm not ready to cash in my chips to give KSM a break. He would not give any of us a break if he was in a position to do it. Even after all that said, I would be leaning toward life without parole to deny him martyr status with the crazies like him still roaming out there. But that would mean we would be inviting hostage taking and all sorts of things by terrorists trying to obtain his freedom. So, I say get rid of him. Too bad we had to put him through the courts instead of feeding him to the sharks along with OBL

The process is probably unstoppable at this point, although I will still trudge to the polls on election Tuesday--not because I still believe my vote will make any difference at all, but because I don't want to give even passive consent to the destroyers of democracy.

I know that the Republicans will almost certainly sweep the elections next month, and that when they do, the voter-suppression effort they launched after their sweep in 2010 will intensify. By the time 2016 rolls around, we'll see not just more gerrymandering and new voter suppression laws, but initiatives like "proportional" electoral vote counting in presidential swing states, designed to ensure that no Democrat can win the White House again.

The left's fantasy of political salvation in the form of a "demographic tidal wave" will come up short in the struggle against a ruthless right wing faction indifferent to basic democratic principles.

Democracies are hard to establish, easy to break, all but impossible to revive once broken. When I was young, even though the country was always in turmoil there was something optimistic about being an American--you felt the promise of the place, you felt that it was possible to make it better, that something grand lay just around the corner if only you were willing to struggle for it.

Thanks to a handful of very rich, deeply arrogant men with delusions of grandeur and an endless supply of cash, that's all gone now. The poor old country is well and truly broken.

The fact that ISIS have apparently sought, and at least been been willing to accept ransoms for their captives instead of executing them is pretty good evidence that they are not truly fundamentalists, but rather hypocritical opportunists, as others have written below. They may have their principles, but for enough cash, they are willing to change them.

As for the "pre-modernity" or otherwise of ISIS, surely the simplest and most obvious observation is that their language, world-view, and behaviour are all very similar to those of European Christians circa 400 years ago. Not so much "fundamentalist" as "literalist".

Military solutions to political problems are not the answer. If Assad can't govern the eastern half of Syria, and the "new" Iraqi government can't control that same border on their side, us supplying air power and 500, or so special ops forces in Iraq and Syria isn't going to make any difference. President Obama has now rescinded his own statement in August that we were not going to become Iraq's air force. We will be in Iraq for years to come, supplying air power, intelligence capabilities, political advice, and huge amounts of cash. And their Muslim sects and tribes will still be fighting with each other, and their government will still not be anything close to a functioning democracy.

As for Syria, until Assad dies, or is killed, he will continue to fight all the rebel forces inside its borders. This latest effort of ours is doomed from the start. The President bought himself and his fellow Democrats thin political cover tonight with his tough talk, nothing more. He is using our military might for political cover in our own dysfunctional democracy. The symmetry between us and the Iraqis is frightening and depressing. I expected more from our President. I didn't expect he would cave in to political pressures on this issue, but he has. As much as Iraq was part of George W. Bush's failed legacy, it will now be part of President Obama's as well.

Your post made me laugh.

If you think about it, you would realize that a corporation would always prefer to hire more people, IF it believed that doing so would increase profits.

They only reason they would sit on a large pile of cash is if there is economic uncertainty, or uncertainty on how they would be taxed. Since Obama can't get anyone to vote on his suggested budget, there is significant uncertainty on how they will be taxed.

Obama is the problem!