This argument was rather vehemently made by one of our resident "liberals" recently:

Torture, terrorism, and, presumably, by extension, rape, child molestation, cannibalism et al are much less dangerously "authoritarian" manifestations than the expressed thoughts of people with deeply held, passionate (close your ears children!) convictions opposed to them.

After all, who are these people to claim to know definitivly that no unknown greater good may not come from actions which only APPEAR to their inherently flawed subjectitvity to be great evils?

Best and prudent would be to just let nature take it's course and if any passionate arguments need be harnassed, to allow those with the most power over the flow of information to dictate the prevailing narrative -- as they always do.

PITTSBURGH (KDKA) ― The U.S. Military is demanding that thousands of wounded service personnel give back signing bonuses because they are unable to serve out their commitments.

To get people to sign up, the military gives enlistment bonuses up to $30,000 in some cases.

Now men and women who have lost arms, legs, eyesight, hearing and can no longer serve are being ordered to pay some of that money back.

One of them is Jordan Fox, a young soldier from the South Hills.

He finds solace in the hundreds of boxes he loads onto a truck in Carnegie. In each box is a care package that will be sent to a man or woman serving in Iraq. It was in his name Operation Pittsburgh Pride was started.

Fox was seriously injured when a roadside bomb blew up his vehicle. He was knocked unconscious. His back was injured and lost all vision in his right eye.

A few months later Fox was sent home. His injuries prohibited him from fulfilling three months of his commitment. A few days ago, he received a letter from the military demanding nearly $3,000 of his signing bonus back.

your worst fears may be confirmed by reading Naomi Wolf's newest book, The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot. In it, Wolf proves the old axiom that history does repeat itself. Or more accurately, history occurs in patterns, and in order to understand where our country is today and where it is headed, we need to read the history books.

Wolf began by diving into the early years leading up to fascist regimes, like the ones led by Hitler and Mussolini. And the patterns that she found in those, and others all over the world, made her hair stand on end. In "The End of America," she lays out the 10 steps that dictators (or aspiring dictators) take in order to shut down an open society. "Each of those ten steps is now under way in the United States today," she writes.

If we want an open society, she warns, we must pay attention and we must fight to protect democracy.

Washington - Retired Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top commander in Iraq shortly after the fall of Baghdad, said this week he supports Democratic legislation that calls for most troops to come home within a year.
...
In October, the three-star general told a group of reporters that the U.S. mission in Iraq was a "nightmare with no end in sight." He also called Bush's decision to deploy 30,000 extra forces to Iraq earlier this year a "desperate attempt" to make up for years of misguided policies in Iraq.

   There was little for the unindicted co-conspirators of the Bush administration to give thanks for this week as the clock winds down on the 14 months they have left in power.

    With former White House press secretary Scott McClellan spilling the beans on who told him to lie to the American people and cover up the White House's responsibility for the criminal act of revealing the identity of a covert CIA officer, it clearly was time for some folks to begin drafting their requests for presidential pardons.

    McClellan's revelation makes it abundantly clear that a subsequent statement by Bush that White House aides had no involvement in outing Ms. Plame, and that anyone who did would be fired was also, shall we say, inoperative.

    It also confirms long-held suspicions that the whole despicable affair - an attempt to punish former Ambassador Joseph Wilson for debunking a bit of the bogus intelligence the administration wheeled out to justify invading Iraq - was orchestrated in the offices of Bush and Cheney, and with their knowledge.
...
    Somehow, I have a strong feeling that this isn't the only or the last revelation of wrong-doing and criminality that we're likely to hear before and after Bush and Co. leave office, or that additional presidential acts of clemency will be needed to spare other top administration officials from prison and buy their silence.
...
    We don't beat or torture confessions out of prisoners in violation of our laws and the laws of the civilized world. We don't lock people up and hold them incommunicado for years without charges or trials. But this administration did and does.

    We don't applaud and cheer an administration and a Congress that make the rich vastly richer, the middle class less secure and the poor even poorer. But this administration has done just that, in violation of our principles and the principles of love, peace and charity that are engrained in the Christianity that these rogues and charlatans embrace so publicly but violate every day.

    It will be a good day when they are gone, and good riddance to them all.

I'll just steal from this blog entry (this is an excerpt):

Bernalillo County sheriff Darren White is running for Congress in the first Congressional district.  He has the blessing of Republicans both locally and nationally.  But he does have his fair share of problems.

Including with his job as Bernalillo County Sheriff and racial profiling.  According to the New Mexico Human Right's Coalition, White's Bernalillo County Sheriff's Department was singled out as being a group which used racial profiling (pdf).

Although not listed on the questionnaire, the Bernalillo County Sheriff's Department and the New Mexico State Police were identified by several respondents' as law enforcement agencies with a serious problem with racial and/or ethnic profiling.

Yes, White's BCSD was singled out despite not being on the questionnaire.  Their racial profiling is so bad that people go out of their way to point this out even when they are not specifically asked about it.

One example comes from an Iraqi citizen who was pulled over for legitimate reasons; then things grew weird when the police officer called the FBI to ask what to do.

The racial profiling debate centers on his next move, a phone call from his patrol car to the Albuquerque FBI field office to see if he should take any other action against Hussein.

He was instructed to pass along Hussein's personal information and allow him to go if the background check did not show outstanding warrants.

[...]

"All we were told was that he was suspicious because of his last name and Arab background," [Independent Review Officer Jay] Rowland said.

Darren White defended this as any typical fear-mongering Republican would; he invoked his pal Rudy Giuliani's favorite subject 9/11.  "Our biggest lesson from Sept. 11 was that we had to bridge gaps in communication," White told the Albuquerque Tribune. "The tragedy could have been avoided if more agencies had followed through and shared information."

Do any of the Dems....change their positions?
Would Hilary- who has played it down the middle, basically- jump into the "well I agreed all along that winning the war would be in our country's best interest- I just didn't think President Bush managed the war well at all"

Honda unwraps the 2009 FCX Clarity!

The adoption of broadband helps the economy by leading to more jobs and an overall increase in payroll, according to a new study. The research was conducted by the Sacramento Regional Research Institute on behalf of AT&T, and showed a strong correlation between broadband growth in California and the number of new jobs available, forecasting that even small increases in broadband use could substantially affect the state over the next 10 years. The findings suggest that a greater investment in broadband deployment would significantly benefit not only California, but the rest of the country.

When cable was deregulated in 1984, few believed it would become the dominant way that Americans would receive video. In case it did, to prevent cable from having ridiculous market power, Congress wrote that if 70% of Americans subscribed to cable, the FCC would regulate cable in the name of diversity. Cable is fighting tooth and nail, with both anti-regulatory arguments and disputes over the number of Americans who have cable (though of course they won't release numbers of their own subscribers).

It's a complete bad faith assault from the cable industry so Time Warner and Comcast can get bigger and control more content.  

If you read through the whole article it really appears that the people who did these calls have very close ties to Romney so it's entirely reasonable to suspect that he's manufactured this controversy to make his rivals look bad.