This also undermines the military’s role in dealing with enemy combatants. That may be the Obama Administration’s intention, which might be understandable given the Bush Administration’s poor performance in dealing with the Guantanamo prisoners. This is a poor substitute for fixing the problem.

Just as an aside, the use of “military evidence” in a civilian trial isn’t a problem — in fact, I’m not sure what you mean by that term. The problem here might be the use of enhanced interrogation to get some of the evidence, and that wasn’t done by the military, for the most part.

Timothy McVeigh was a violent criminal guilty of murdering a lot of people, and he got what he deserved. But he can’t be compared to the Islamic extremists who have been waging war against the U.S. for years. The biggest difference is that he wasn’t influenced by a primitive religion with a modern history of violence and murder, his mother didn’t encourage him to go out and kill innocent people for religious reasons, and his actions weren’t applauded by millions and millions of people who shared his religious beliefs (whatever they may have been).

Anonymous, if you read enough on Opinion Forum, you’d know that I’m not anti-Obama and I’m not looking for reasons to complain about him. But this business of bowing to foreign monarchs is wrong, and it’s particularly wrong for an American president, given our history and traditions. Simply put, he ought to know better.

And look at the ones he’s bowed and shown deference to: the King of Saudi Arabia — enough said. The Emperor of Japan — whose very existence is a sign of our tolerance and charity following World War II.

And whom did he not bow to (as far as I know)? The Queen of England, the one monarch that he should respect most among them all (although he still shouldn’t bow).

The issue is that we are born sovereign. As sovereigns, we have no superiors or inferiors, only equals. As a replacement for a handshake, no problem. As a symbol of inferiors, huge problem.

I don’t see why. It was less than 100 years ago that we created the Fed, and only 40 since we ditched the gold standard altogether. Why is it impossible to go back to a commodity/representative standard (a representative currency is paper backed by some sort of commodity) with the number of dollars to a troy ounce of gold/silver regulated by Congress? I know people have said that there isn’t enough gold in the world to represent wealth anymore, but really, according to whom? The amount of money something costs isn’t assigned arbitrarily; it depends on that item’s value relative to other items and the amount of money in the market. If there was less money in the market, prices would just go down to reflect it. Wages would go down too, but as long as purchasing power remained equivalent, why would that be an issue? If you’re making $100 and it costs you $50 to live, what’s the difference between that and making 80$ when it costs you $40 to live? If private banks were allowed to issue notes based on their specie reserves, it would break the power of the Fed and the monopoly on our money. And if there were no monopoly on the money supply, then the collapse of one bank or even a set of banks would not bring down the system (it’d kinda suck, but then so does this recession). And as long as Congress set the standard of how many dollars one could issue per amount of gold/silver, it would keep the bankers from running off into the clouds with the money supply. You wouldn’t even have to use only gold/silver if you didn’t want to; the Weimar Republic backed the Rentenmark in real estate, and it would be perfectly possible to issue a currency backed in some other commodity. The main requirement would be that any piece of paper would have to be backed by some solid, tangible asset so that people couldn’t lie about the money supply.

The only power the Fed has that private banks don’t and can’t without government support is the power to make money out of thin air via printing press without backing it with anything. Banks like that because it allows them to make more loans whether they can afford to do it or not. Government likes that because it allows them to embark on massive spending whether they can afford to do it or not. The people just get screwed.

Elizabeth, I’m afraid there’s a problem of reality in dreaming of the “sustainable economy” you referred to. Economies, and economic systems, can only grow or not grow. Not growing means collapse in fairly short order. There simply can be no such thing as a completely stable, non-volatile economy. In order to even think about such a model, you have to hold every variable you can think of constant, and there will still be variables you’ve missed. Unfortunately, the variables are all dynamic.

John, you’re way off the mark on all counts. The Federal Reserve System is, in fact, a creation of the government, through the Federal Reserve Act. Everything about the Fed can be changed by Congress (and the President), to include abolishing it. The Fed most certainly does not “own” the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The idea that the Fed owns everything and could get away with shooting the Pope is, if you’ll pardon my bluntness, one of the silliest conspiracy theories I’ve heard.