Ah, I'm beginning to suspect that in the way EPU has become, in the blogosphere, a way of saying that your post was made at an unfortunate time, "clownsense" is going to become descriptive of a style of writing that at first glance may not seem to make much sense, but in its lyricism, beauty, and unique choices of wordplay conveys a truth that is far above the non.

Lots of records that I would have suggested have already come up, but here's a few more:

NRBQ - At Yankee Stadium

Richard and Linda Thompson - Shoot Out the Lights

XTC - Skylarking

Flaming Lips - The Soft Bulletin

Paul Kelly - Under the Sun

Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes - Hearts of Stone

I'm starting to believe that we're going to see the crisis hit before the 2008 elections. Whether it's over funding for Iraq, the treatment of wounded soldiers, the betrayal of Valerie Plame, the firing of prosecutors or the FBI and the NSL's, the Democrats and Congress are going to be forced to either stand up to an unlawful presidency and re-assert the Constitution, or aquiesce in Bush and Cheney's power grab, and watch the power of Congress come to an end.

Isn't this situation, a rogue President who tosses his oath of office and the Constitution into the shredder, just the kind of thing impeachment was intended for?

Don't forget about Newt Gingrich's proposed assault on the first amendment, http://www.nysun.com/article/44302. These guys are out to gut the entire Bill of Rights.

Terrific post, the mainstream media's cozying up to power is one of the most dangerous trends of our time.

I do think you may have been too tough on Aravosis. It reads to me like the reference is to himself, and not Kurtz. He's not saying "You are fair" to Kurtz, he's saying "I think are you fair" as a comparison to asking "are you left" or "are you right".

"Aravosis can clear it up."

That sounds fair.

Piece by piece, everything necessary for a totalitarian police state is being put into place.

Here's my question. Who paid Mr Slack for this piece of PR tripe, Salon or Answers In Genesis? Both?

Well, this is explains why so many times I check out recommended music here and up scratching my head, wondering "What's so great about that?"

Everyone's musical tastes differ, but to consistently rip the Beatles and promote music such as Journey proves that some people just live in different musical worlds. The Beatles were craftsman in the best sense of the word, in their arrangements there is not one unnecessary note, everything works for the benefit of the paticular song. It's the musical equivalent of Shakespeare's writing. With Journey, the undeniably impressive technique is used to cover up the lack of originality in the songs themselves, it's all bombast designed to puff up what is at its core material that is musically ordinary and lyrically pedestrian.

At least, that's the way it has always seemed to me, and the fact that we seem to hear the same music so differently is, I think, why I find so little in common between my own tastes and Salon's recommendations.

Here's the deal. In the 1960's the term sci-fi was coined inside the science fiction community and specifically referred to the bad stuff, clanking robots, silly aliens, spaceships that flew like jet airplanes in space, all that kind of stuff. Science fiction readers used the abbreviation SF to refer to the books they liked and recommended to each other. Sci-fi was then picked up by mainstream publications in the 70's and used by critics, most of whom only knew science fiction from bad tv shows and movies to refer to all science fiction, whether it featured silly aliens, or, in the case of writers like Ursula LeGuin, Frederick Pohl and many others, books that actually combined literary values with thoughtful extrapolation. For the next twenty years science fiction writers explained over and over again the difference they saw in the two terms, but to no avail. (Harlan Ellison's rant on the sc-fi channel is a classic example). The rest of the world was going to call it sci-fi whether the science fiction community liked it or not.

That's why old-time SF fans hate the word sci-fi. Not only was it originally meant as a deragatory term, the rest of the world insisted on using it as the description of all science fiction. By the way, unless someone else can show me an example, it's the only time I know of a creative community not being allowed to use their own preferred way of naming their work.

Well, that's an old battle, and from the viewpoint of SF fans it was lost long ago. The topic at hand is summer reading, and I have a couple books to recommend. Kay Kenyon's "Bright of the Sky", the story of a man searching for his past and lost family in an alternate, manufactured unoverse, is a classic adventure story in the tradition of Dune and Riverworld. And if you read Minister Faust's "From The Notebooks of Dr. Brain", you'll never look at super-heroes in quite the same way again.

Thanks for writing this up. I caught a bit of this live when it aired and sat there truly dumbfounded by what I was hearing and seeing. Tucker and Jonah were like two giggly junior-high girls sharing their latest crush.

It says way too much about the present level of public discourse that two such shallow, vapid people are given a prominent forum from which to express their silly opinions. It's embarassing for them, and for us.