And there was the other woman who pulled me aside. She had come down from Germantown, Pa., she told me, but she, too, declined to give her name -- for fear of Obama's "snitches," she explained.

My ancestors founded Germantown Pennsylvania in the second year of the colonoization of Pennsylvania, 1642. They were "Germans" from Frankfurt-am-Main, fleeing persecution by both Protestants and Catholics for the heresy of being Quakers. In 1688, they became the first group of Europeans on the planet to make the non-ownership of slaves a condition of membership in their community. Many of the descendants of those first abolitionists became "fighting Quakers" during the Revolution - and many of them gave up everything when the Loyalist traitor who ran the town confiscated their property for their rebellion.

Like most Quaker-founded communities in Pennsylvania, Germantown has obviously forgotten its heritage.

You gotta love Ohanian - the man is truly relentless in his efforts to destroy the reputation of UCLA as a school that promotes intellectual rigor in a reality-based community.

Professional athletes need to get it through their heads that their position is not something they're entitled to. For every one of them, there's ten out there who could do the job who didn't get noticed. If professional athletes discovered that the bad behavior they were raised with was unacceptable and would result in their losing their privileges, society would be better off. Of course, the way Americans consider professional sports the national religion, this is unlikely to happen.

Michael Vick should have gotten 30 minutes of what he did to the hundreds of dogs he murdered. Maybe 30 minutes on the "rape stand" would have been sufficient. He's a scummy piece of shit and should be flushed.

California's budget fix: Screw the poor, the frail, the young, the students, and the environment.

Sounds very Republican to me. I'm sure the California Dumbocraps are happy as pigs in shit over the redistricting deal they did in 2000, to protect all incumbents - those two Republican seats they could have gerrymandered would have been pretty darn useful about now.

Too bad he didn't recommend that Reagan not suck up to

Bruce Springsteen regarding "Born in the USA", given that Springsteen handed Ronnie the Ray-Gun his ass and showed how "in touch" he was with pop culture. Roberts advice comes under "'tis better to be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and prove it beyond doubt." And for politicians - particularly Republican politicians - he was right.

It's not "American farmers" - it's American Agribusiness, the companies who also own the forest land that is being burned down in Central America, Indonesia, etc. The whole question of ethanol and biofuels and agriculture has to be looked at in a global perspective, where the bad guys (as usual) are American corporations.

Also, we get to beat our healthy smoke-free chests over the FDA now getting to regulate tobacco, not noticing that Big Tobacco has quietly moved their operations overseas, where tobacco farming in Africa now takes enough land that - did this crop not exist there - Africans could feed themselves. And then, of course, the tobacco is made into cigarettes that are sold completely unregulated in those countries.

But we Americans get to feel good about how "green" and "healthy" we are.

This is mindboggling on many levels. First, there's the confounding spectacle of a Georgian Republican harking back to Lincoln as an inspiration, which inevitably reminded me that the heart of the modern Republican party is now located in the Deep South, which a: Lincoln crushed in a bloody civil war, and b: in large part became a Republican stronghold because of the Voting Rights Act that gave the descendents of the slaves Lincoln freed real access to the ballot box, and thus sent white southern Democrats scurrying to the GOP. Would Lincoln recognize his own party if he was alive today?

That's why it's now known as the White Southern Confederate Traitor Party.

Throughout the history of the U.S., the Southernist (as distinguished from "Southerner")incubus has jumped back and forth as a parasite on one or the other of the two national parties (whatever their names at the time) to provide one with the winning margin over the other in return for the victor leaving the "peculiar institutions" of the South and its general culture alone. That worked until the Democrats threw off the incubus during the civil rights movement, and it realized that the parasite had to take over and control the body of the host, failing to realize that when that happens, the host ultimately dies. And so, only 40 years later, we see that happening, while the incubus flails helplessly now that it's caught out in the light of day where it can be clearly seen. When most people see the ugly monster, they turn away from it in horror, which is what is happening now

I guess I must have been on another planet recently. There are shows worth watching on network TV? And we are supposed to care about their new shows?

That's definitely news to me.

Die, networks - in a cold dark place, with the cause of death something polite society doesn't speak of. Preferably extremely painful.

I volunteer to inflict the pain very painfully on that little min-Putz, Ben Silverman. What a joy it will be to see him hanging from the nearest telephone pole as the meat rots off the skeleton.