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I think many in the younger generation do, and that's the camp Obama seems to appeal the most to. Or, you know, those liberal types. They actually like this stuff. That wasn't what happened in 2004. Who's being criminal? I mean, a District Court judge did rule George W. Bush is a felon for violating FISA, but other than that? If the election goes the way I want it to, I'll certainly be celebrating and feel hopeful for the future of the country for the first time in a long, long while.

Okay. Well the way I see it we tried the Republicans in charge of everything thing, then we tried the split deck thing and that worked out even worse. There's not a whole lot left to try, and from the polls, it seems like America wants a Democratic president and more Democratic control in the Senate. And I agree with America... w00t!

As a programmer, I think PowerPoints are invaluable, however you don't want to use the PowerPoint as some sort of crib notes. I like labeling each slide with a theme and putting up code snippets which explain what I'm talking about. You can try to do the same thing live with an impromptu demo, but it has a much higher probability of failure.

ecoli, ParanoiA: Do you honestly think something the size of the US economy can operate on anything besides a fiat currency? It's not 1950 anymore, folks...

Let me just add: FiveThirtyEight says the Democrats have a 20% chance of getting 60 seats

CNN is speculating that a "perfect storm" of bad crap happening in America might be enough for Democrats to get 60 seats in the Senate, which would make them filibuster-proof and would undo the gridlock which has drug the current Congress down to record levels of disapproval: http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/10/08/senate.election/index.html?eref=rss_topstories FiveThirtyEight, a multi-poll aggregator site specializing in predicting the outcome of elections, presently estimates that the Democrats will win 56 seats: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/ I think it's unlikely that the Democrats could actually win 60 seats in the Senate, although it's certainly not something I'd be opposed to. Political gridlock has hurt this country terribly.

Yes. And I'm not one to to quote Bush's statements in defense of a point very often, but I think the consequences of letting the financial sector collapse outweigh those of bailing them out. A bailout was successful in averting the S&L crisis, where we saw a much more averse stock market reaction and were able to bail out the financial sector to a much smaller degree. That "implied government safety net" must be met with much more stringent regulation. I think there was a total across-the-board failure of the government to regulate the economy. I think the natural behavior of the markets is not conducive to a modern society, a lesson I hope we would've learned during the Great Depression. To Dr. Paul's statements: he acts as if we let the entire financial sector collapse the dollar would be spared. I don't know what he's thinking in terms of a government response... well actually I do: he wants extreme cutbacks of all federal services. I assume at that point the government would go into a mode of simply paying off existing debts using taxpayer dollars, scaling back all other services. How many people would actually want to pay taxes to such a government? That said, without some sort of strategy which is very much opposed to the way the government operates now, I don't see the dollar weathering a complete collapse of the U.S. financial sector any better than it would weather the bailout. Ron Paul draws a considerable amount of attention to the latter and says relatively little about the former. That's the sort of thing I consider myopic. But then again he does play to the Libertarian (capital L) fantasyland that if we just had Laissez Faire capitalism the market would magically solve all problems and we wouldn't have to think about them ourselves.

I'm very frustrated by the nonstop talking points. This isn't a debate. It's an advertisement.

Brokaw: "Is Russia an evil empire, yes or no?" McCain: "Maybe!"

Yeah, it's a Town Hall, and the questions are... pretty damn weird. At least the questions were good in the last debates, but I guess that's what you get with professional interviewers asking them. "Is healthcare a privilege, a right, or a responsibility?" WTF?

But again, those are comments made by Bill Maher outside the scope of the movie. I thought this was supposed to be a thread about Religulous, not Bill Maher in general.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/financialcrisis/3147266/Pakistan-facing-bankruptcy.html They have $8 billion in cash but $5 billion in outstanding liabilities, not to mention a leadership crisis. I don't think things are boding well for the 6th most populous nation on earth, which is also a nuclear power and harbors a nuclear scientist who not only knows how to build bombs from scratch but already sold secrets to Iran and North Korea.

Okay, but none of your complaints were about the movie, they were about Maher himself. That's called an ad hominem... When I'm talking about Expelled, I'm not talking about things Kevin Miller or Ben Stein did outside the context of the film. I'm talking about Expelled itself.

This is a dandy hypothesis, but there's no evidence for it whatsoever. If what you're saying is the case it'd be a major revolution in biology. However after years of research into the way neurons operate, no evidence for quantum mechanical behavior has been found. There certainly is: can the behavior of the systems be modeled with classical mechanics, or do we notice a breakdown in classical models such that quantum mechanics is necessary to explain their behavior? The behavior of neurons has been studied extensively at the molecular level. Neurons are presently being modeled on the molecular level as part of the BlueBrain project. Their models are based around classical mechanics. Well if this was the case then the problem of abiogenesis would have been solved long before. Abiogenesis is a mystery, but is the solution necessarily quantum mechanical? We have no reason to believe that. Again, this is a mystery, but why is the solution necessarily quantum mechanical? In these sorts of problems bringing in quantum mechanics is a red herring. It offers no more explanatory power than a magical rock. There's no evidence that quantum mechanics has anything to with these cases. It's a "god of the gaps" argument, or in this case a "quantum in the gaps" argument. The pineal gland has been studied extensively. It produces melatonin, a hormone that affects our circadian rhythms. It has nothing to do with memory. The structures most involved with memory are the neocortex and the hippocampus.

Perhaps you should see the movie first before criticizing it. So far it seems like all your criticisms are based on probabilities of what it might be based on Maher's opinions rather than anything that's actually in the movie. No, I was pointing out Expelled invoked Godwin's Law by comparing belief in evolution to Nazism. They lose the argument by default, thus spoketh the Internet. Okay, that's great, but again it's not in the movie. Gratuitous comparisons between evolutionists and Nazis were actually in Expelled. What if Maher decided to compare religious people to Nazis in Religulous? Wouldn't there be "outright harm" in that?

You mean if we had simply let the entire mortgage market collapse, everything would be dandy? Well, that's certainly Dr. Paul's opinion... I think it's myopic.

Interesting to see CNN's fact check on this: http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/10/06/fact-check-did-mccain-intervene-on-behalf-of-charles-keating/#more-23012

Can you name a specific logical fallacy you believe Maher is making in the movie? Expelled is full of logical fallacies, namely the good old argument from personal incredulity, not to mention everybody's favorite, the "reductio ad Hitlerum" But more than that, he distorts facts, and argues against science. The movie is quite literally full of lies. Expelled argument is that there's a systematic conspiracy to silence creationists and prevent them from being a part of the scientific discourse. He bases this entire claim on a single journal article written by Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute, which is a creationist think tank. Meyer wrote an article which was published by a minor scientific journal with a circulation of about 300 people. The article did not undergo the typical peer review process and was simply published without review by the journal's editor, Robert Sternberg. Meyer's article thus became the first creationist paper ever published in a peer-reviewed journal, and thus became a talking point for the creationist movement. Sternberg was subsequently EXPELLED for not following basic scientific rigor like peer review and publishing an article which was frankly a giant crock of creationist bullsh*t. This incident was massively expanded into a feature length film about how evolutionists are Nazis who are trying to suppress the truth about us really being made by God. Zuh? These two films don't even compare. I can't ever imagine Expelled being well-received by anyone with a brain, however I can actually see Religious being well-received by less orthodox members of the religious community.

In their defense the trailer was made available before the actual video

It was odd seeing her rather flustered reaction on Meet the Press. It was clear Ifill was angry at Palin for dodging the questions, but her reaction to it was "What was I supposed to do? Steer her back on track?" Is there some rule against that I'm not aware of? Shouldn't the debate moderator step in at that point? I don't get it

Pr... int?

The Dow dropped below 10,000 this morning, currently down some 370 points. Ugh.

It may just be a coincidence, but they did release it exactly 30 days before the election. I'm guessing their decision to release it had more involved than Palin's offhand guilt by association slander. Things like: the documentary's production schedule, time until the election, the financial crisis, etc.

http://www.keatingeconomics.com/ The Obama campaign has released a documentary highlighting John McCain's involvement in the Keating Five scandal. This seems unprecedented to me... has another presidential campaign ever produced a documentary about their opponent?

One of the most interesting things I've read is that this isn't so much a liquidity crisis as banks being afraid to lend money to each other.