Troops shoot two Iraqi women at checkpoint.

[Shlomart Ben Yisrael]

If the US wanted him dead, he'd be dead.

I thought you guys didn't negotiate with terrorists?

He's alive in a country you occupy. That's a negotiated stand-off by any definition.

[BSmack]

I am familiar with your community by way of Norman Rockwell's rendering.

It's the one where the barber gets the crying boy to sit still for a haircut by offering him a lollipop, while the other boys stop their game of stickball to press their faces against the shop window and stare in amusement, right?

That is actually very funny. But not in the way you intended it. I guess you have to be familiar with the works of the Genesee Valley's poet laureate John Bartles to understand the unintentional humor in your post.

[Mike the Lab Rat]

Libertarianism consists of more than just being a disgruntled Republican and an all round greedy prick.

True, but I've never been Republican, nor would I consider myself "greedy." It's kind of hard to take the notion of myself and my family as "greedy" when I willingly gave up a better-paying job in HIV research to teach at a small rural school near my home. My wife is a small business owner (she's actually self-employed as a nail tech) who got tired of being nickled and dimed by state fees and taxes for employee stuff and wound up having to let her employees go in order for her to actually make any profit. NY's "nanny state" mentality makes it damned unfriendly for businesses (hence its slow upstate economy).

I'm more of a Jeffersonian/Cato institute moderate libertarian. I'm not goofy enough to think that elevator inspections, meat inspections, etc. should be left entirely to the free markets, but I definitely believe that both state and federal governments in the US have gone way beyond their constitutionally-allowed powers and injected themselves into areas they have no business in (the arts, education, etc.).

You sure have a nationalist streak for a libertarian.

To assume that pride in one's nation and libertarianism are mutually exclusive shows an ignorance of libertarianism.