Republicans like to accuse the Democrats of "cut and run". I accuse the Republicans of being the "Sitting Duck" party. The chickenhawks want to leave our brave soldiers in a vulnerable spot without an exit strategy. I'd much rather follow the lead of the soldiers in the field and withdraw from a quagmire than to have our men and women in uniform be the playthings of election year politics.

Here's an amendment to the Constitution that everyone can get behind:

No Flag Burning at Gay Marriages.

The time is now.

I review a lot of music, including music for kids, archived at http://www.romm.org/CD_recommend.html . In addition to old favorites like Peter Paul and Mary, Tom Paxton and Tom Chapin, there are new(er) musicians such as Joe Scruggs and Michael Mish. As I've found out from my nieces and nephews, it's all new to a two year old.

I'm glad more and more former young people are making music for kids. I'm also happy that established musicians are turning an eye to the younger set: The Roches and Bill Staines have done good albums. The resurgence of Schoolhouse Rock DVDs and a continuing exploration of dinosaurs shows just how timeless this music is.

ESPN (and you) are missing a potentially nifty stat, at least for us Americans with a short attention span: The team that scores the last goal usually wins!

I have no stats to back this up, and might be wrong, but what the heck. I'll let you provide the sabermetrics of soccer.

Also: Is it true that the team with the largest endorsement contracts, in toto, usually win? Size (of monetary compensation) matters.

The vast majority of violence against arabs comes from other arabs. How do the airports in Egypt or Lebanon guard against terrorists? Obviously racial profiling won't help. Does Quaddafi keep a list of his old comrades to watch out for at the Tripoli airport?

Mission accomplished.

The right wingers can whine all they want, but the fact remains that far too many on the ultra-right are all gosh-wow about war but are dreadfully uncomfortable when it's their ass on the line. Wearing a uniform is a new experience for too many warmongers.

Back in the 1960s, a president from Texas lied about the reasons to go to war, and the mainstream news media did a lousy job of covering issues that mattered to people. Underground Newspapers were born. Scatological, rude and often amateurish, they were also scathingly ironic, hysterically funny and sometimes covered local news better than the newspapers of record. They were born not of frustration with Vietnam, but of frustration with the news media.

What we would now call political blogging arose in the late 1990s because the World Wide Web made it possible for almost anyone with a minimum of equipment and training to have as great a presence as billion dollar corporations. The first ones were on the hard right: Matt Drudge gave up trying to sling mud at Hollywood so he could sling mud at Bill Clinton. Freepers lowered the standards of message boards everywhere. Right wingers felt that the news media wasn't covering the stories that mattered to them. As it turned out, they were tools of Lee Atwater and Karl Rove and the stories that the conservatives claimed were important turned out to lies. Starting in the early 90s (if not earlier) the mainstream media's hard shift to the right destroyed the credibility of tv news and newspapers. Bloggers, of any political persuasion, came in to fill the credibility gap. Just like Underground Newspapers, political blogs came about because the mainstream media is not doing its job.

The conservative news media doesn't practice "journalism" in any meaningful sense of the word. Most bloggers don't either, but then few claim journalistic standards, being happy to be accurate and tenacious.

I don't read many blogs outside The War Room. I have my own radio program, Shockwave Radio Theater, science fiction humor at its best, on a non-profit radio station. I get my political licks in, but mainly I poke fun at everything. www.romm.org . But I come from a journalism background, and know good reporting when I see it. I don't see it... and would rather get my news from reliable sources like The Daily Show and from places that link to primary source material. Sometimes, I even read the right-leaning blogs, but they manage to be scatological, rude and amateurish without being funny or accurate. At least the left-leaning blogs are funny, strive for accuracy, tenaciously report a story where the mainstream is afraid to and are, for the most part, polite.

Judging by the letters published here so far, Tom nailed it. The profane and scatological right wingers offer nothing but spew... while the rest of us just laugh at them.

Too bad the issue is so serious. The conservative spin is so unAmerican, Bill O'Reilly has to lie like Joe McCarthy (see http://journals.democraticunderground.com/top10/246 , Top 10 Conservative Idiots #7.)

I predict the 2006 elections will bring even more hate speech from sphincter conservatives. They have nothing else.