The woman would snap in two in a strong wind. Maybe I'm sensitive from the days when wotmaniacs would teasingly offer her up as a "leggy blonde" but politics weren't the only problem for me there; I don't want to be impaled by my girlfriend. As to the politics, I'll go further: They raise your blood pressure and do other things that are bad for you. Moore has been known to make some good points, and maybe Coulter has, too, but in both cases it's buried in such sensationalism and hyperbole that the VALID arguments are easy to miss and seldom worth the trouble to find.

Oh, you can beat up on the whole lot of them all day long, though I will say that none of them, from Robertson to Wright, are at the full-blown Farrakhan level of vileness, I believe they still qualify as 'primarily sane, should not be tarred and feathered except metaphorically'
Each dangerous though, particularly the ones clearly promoting purely political agendas under the cloak of religion. Honestly, the right wing takeover of the Southern Baptists has done more damage to the Church than to the nation (and the damage to the latter is significant. ) I'll send you an article on how it began later, if I can keep it in my head long enough; it happened to be in my hometown so I've got a special edition of the Chronicle printed for the week long Southern Baptist Convention that turned into a political sideshow with enduring consequences for the whole country. These people are a threat to the country and to the Church, which makes them doubly inexcusable to me.

No win situation; believe it or not, Dukakis was attacked for a non-emotional response to the prospect of his wife being raped and murdered. Of course, if he goes off in a justifiable rant at Bernard Shaw he's equally screwed. "Governor, did you beat Kitty again last night?" I don't think asking Bush about Quayles qualifications was out of bounds, though the manner was pretty over the top. But then, I was always in the camp that believed Bush only picked Quayle as a running mate who wouldn't overshadow him, since, at the time, he was widely seen as a weak candidate (at least until he decided to "fix" the "wimp problem" by lashing out at Dan Rather in an interview, the start of a feud that would ultimately end Rathers career after what I strongly suspect was a setup, but that's a whole other debate I'd prefer not to reenter. )

Necessary evil; if you're going to ban something from the schools you better be able to justify the law. That's one of the things the courts are for, y'know, and the best way to expose and draw attention to a bad law is to get someone prosecuted for doing the right thing. Which is why the ACLU ran ads in Tennessee papers looking for a teacher willing to teach evolution. Not the point though, my point was that Darrow and Bryan were very much on the opposite side of THAT issue, but had a life long friendship built around all the other populist issues for which they fought long and hard together.

I don't know that the lefts fringe is all that out of control nationally; they certainly haven't floated anything like a Constitutional amendment against gay marriage or banning late term abortions they already got banned. The last one is kind of impressive, really; the far right wouldn't let a little thing like already getting their way on an issue keep them from using it to lure uninformed voters to the polls. Sure, the fringe left has gotten out of control in local areas where they aren't considered "fringe" but on a national level I can't really think of much. The Assault Weapons Ban, maybe? Bush took care of that one though, so Kalashnikov owners everywhere can sleep free and easy.

I'd be happy to see some real federal insurance regulation, but I'm not holding my breath and don't think it would do a darned thing to expand coverage. Of course, long term, neither will this bill, because without effective cost controls health insurance will ultimately become too expensive for the government to afford, too (as is already happening with Medicare, just not at the rate of private insurance because Medicare is single payer. ) The bottom line is that no industrialized nation can let the price of things everyone needs to survive be set by market forces alone, because the one (and only) time suppliers set prices is when they're supplying something without which people can't live.