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They told me that if I voted for McCain, the White House would order Army generals to condemn blasphemy and try to suppress the 1st Amendment rights of fringe religious groups in the United States... and they were right!

I'm completely uninterested in keeping guns out of the hands of people this crazy, because that's totally beside the point. Sure, people this crazy shouldn't have guns; whatever. People this crazy also shouldn't be able to drive cars. People this crazy also shouldn't be able to own kitchen knives. People this crazy also shouldn't be able to shove a pedestrian off the curb in front of a bus.

The world's full of potential weapons. Rather than keep every last one of them out of the hands of people this crazy, people this crazy should be should be freaking institutionalized, not walking around in public!

Early. This is a “mega La Nina” winter—we’re going to set records for cold and snow. This is already the coldest November since 1955.

Don't waste your time. Anyone who believes businesses have a sacred duty to provide lifetime employment is a lost cause. Not even the Cuban communist government provides lifetime employment anymore!

But if you want to try, try this: Ask her (dollars to donuts it's a "her") to look around her own workplace and swear on the Bible that she doesn't see 1 in 10 people who deserve to be laid off. Ask her to swear that she doesn't encounter 1 in 10 sales clerks, customer service reps and other people in her daily life who deserve to be fired. Heck, I barely encounter 1 in 10 who deserve not to be let go.

Every single company that's growing grows too fast and too big, then has to spend some time shrinking and reorganizing to become efficient again. The 90% of the people left behind typically get nice large bonuses when this happens or the year after, because a) they were the ones worth keeping, and b) the company is now more efficient and successful.

Well, sticking to their principles hasn’t gotten the Libertarians anywhere. I guess whoredom is as logical a next step to try as any.

"Let's face it: I still play in California, and as a gay man I have no legal rights whatsoever."

Some readers might be confused and alarmed, thinking that California denies gays the right to trial by jury, peaceable assembly or security in their houses and effects from search. Rest assured this is not the case. "No legal rights whatsoever" is just a figure of speech meaning "exactly the same legal rights as everyone else, without exception."

So that they can have open-casket funerals.

"Racism is about the abuse of power."

Ah. So it is therefore impossible to be racist toward the President of the United States, who is the most powerful person in the world. Thanks, NAACP, good to know.

So instead of a budget czar Obama hired a budget mohel. I guess that tells us all we need to know about the size of the cuts to expect.

Dear Democrats, please, by all means, run on a message of “The recession is over and we’re the ones to thank!”

Okay, Jimbo, quick timeline:

• January 2009: Obama becomes President.
• February 2009: Major Obama donor and cap-and-trade advocate BP files an environmental impact statement for the Macondo well, stating that a spill was unlikely and that if a spill did occur it wouldn't affect the shore, since the well was 48 miles off the coast.
• July 2009: Obama appoints environmental activist attorney Elizabeth Birnbaum, who has no oil industry experience or education, as Director of the Minerals Management Service, the agency that oversees all US offshore drilling.
• October 2009: BP begins drilling the well.
• April 2010: Despite repeated warnings from Halliburton experts that BP was violating several important industry best practices, MMS issues a permit for BP to complete the well.
• April 20, 2010: Well explodes in exactly the way Halliburton warned.

Now, go ahead and tell me again how this is Bush's fault. I'm listening, I really am.

"The next obvious question is this -— WHERE is APPLE manufacturing these products?"

In countries whose citizens actually want to work for a living. The citizens of this country, by contrast, claim they want to work, then put the lie to that by continually voting statists--from both parties--into office. When US voters stop electing politicians who loot the productive to coddle the indolent, then you can start criticizing companies for seeking sunnier climes.

I'd say Jefferson changed subjects into citizens via the Declaration of Independence (plus the blood, toil, sweat and tears of the patriots).

"City Council passes Daley gun restrictions 45-0"

100% approval with minutes of deliberation? Kim Jong Il doesn't have that level of control over North Korea's parliament.

"Sully, so just whose son IS Trig? Certainly not Bristol's as her own pregnancy would not have permitted that."

Simple. Trig is Bristol's son. Tripp is fake, a robot baby developed for the RNC by a joint venture between Halliburton and Diebold.

I bow to no one in my contempt for McQueeg, but the plain fact is that Brewer's statement was bizarre, stupid and would be mocked by everyone here if it came from a Democrat. "Most," as in 50.1%, of all illegal immigrants crossing the Arizona border are absolutely not smuggling drugs.

Just think about the logistics of that, from the standpoint of a drug smuggler. You've got a pack of scruffy farm workers who are crossing the border to find jobs that pay $2.50 an hour... are you seriously going to trust these people to each carry a $15,000 brick of cocaine, or even a $1,000 kilo of marijuana? Why would you ever expect to see them again on the other side of the border? And why would you even bother? It's not remotely difficult to smuggle drugs across the border; why would you dragoon a bunch of amateurs to do it for you?

Now think about it from the illegal's standpoint. If you get caught in the US illegally, at the very worst you get a free ride back to Mexico. If you get caught on the Mexican side of the border, nothing happens at all. But get caught on either side of the border with a kilo of coke, and you go to serious prison for a serious amount of time. Why would you risk that?

I think what Brewer meant to say is that most coyotes are also drug runners, and that I will believe. I'll even believe that most groups of border crossers contain a drug mule or two using the illegals as cover. But the notion that half of all illegals are smuggling a dime bag in their socks or whatever, no, that's "Guam tipping over"-level stupidity.

Well, to be completely fair, McCain would never have picked Palin as his VP candidate if Hillary hadn’t run. I say that not as a slam against Palin but as a slam against McCain’s lack of principle and vision.

This is actually a well-established problem in airline safety: Crews from hierarchical cultures have worse safety records than ones from egalitarian cultures. Pilots can get trapped in a mindset of "I just need to land the damn plane and get out of this weather" and become fixated on landing no matter what. It's the copilot's job to speak up at that point and, as this one tried to do, get the pilot to step back and reevaluate. But in hierarchical cultures, copilots speak too deferentially and pilots don't listen well. It takes a lot of training on both sides to overcome that; sounds like the copilot had that training but the pilot may not have.

Malcom Gladwell's Tipping Point has a great chapter on this issue.

"...a president who rarely vents his frustration..."

What president is that? The only one I know about vents his frustration all the damn time. He just does it in really b*tchy, passive-aggressive ways like subtly flipping off Hillary or calling Palin a pig.

Simple: Every country has its own mix of commercial laws regarding what gets taxed, how the taxes must be paid, what information you can collect regarding customers and their payment instruments, how revenues have to be reported and to whom, how products can be advertised, what languages products may be sold in, what content products can and can't contain, and on and on and on and on and on. In many countries, violations of these laws are criminal offenses that carry actual jail time.

If a company has been doing business in a country for years, then it already knows how to comply with most of those laws. If a country is a major market, then it's worth the company's while to hire local attorneys to figure out how to navigate those laws. But if the company is relatively new to the country, and the country isn't a major market, then it's just not worth the legal risk. If Steve Jobs gives a speech in Poland, Apple doesn't want him arrested by some local prosecutor from Bad Plotzenberg because the iTunes store broke the law by conducting business on Smigus Dyngus Day.