It was Nixon who got the Klan and the religious fanatics to board the Republican bus to nowhere 40 years ago. The upstanding cloth coat Republicans, with their gay friends (and kids) and their staid, respectable churches made a deal with the devil, and let the stinking, drooling, cretinous third of the American population onboard the bus in return for broad electoral dominance and low taxes on their - by this point - almost entirely unearned riches. Inheritance and position were freely handed down from one generation of out-of-touch kleptocrats to another, until finally even obvious Ponzi schemes like the dot com and real estate bubbles were embraced, defended and promoted at the highest levels. Remember Shrub crowing about his beloved "Ownership Society" before Congress just four or five years ago?

Well, the taxpayers got "owned" alright, as they're now being called upon to fund trillions in bailouts for idiot-run financial services titans, who plowed full-steam ahead into massively obvious fiscal icebergs. It's kind of hard to argue against socialism with a straight face while you're asking Wal*Mart greeters to part with $15,000 in order to keep outfits like AIG from imploding. If those idiots can get a handout, what about people who do legitimate, productive work for a living? Where's THEIR handout?

So now what's left of the Northeastern cloth coat Republicans have abandoned the 'Puggies for the Democrats - there isn't a single Republican rep left from the Northeast. Not one. Their Republican Senators will be the next to go extinct. What was once the Republican's core is gone. They're left with the cretins and maniacs Nixon let on the bus, stranded in the middle of nowhere and surrounded by an electorate which isn't just disinclined to agree with their imbecilic, racist core, but which actively detests it.

Rush thinks he's the leader of these cretins now, but when the mob gets hungry and restless they're as likely to skin him alive as sing hosannas. You could make a lot of lard from that tub.

It should be fun to watch the remaining Republicans devour one another. They should rename themselves the Donner Party.

He's on drugs again.

I kind of pity him. With "fans" like that, I'd have to take drugs, too.

Hardly. If anything, Lily whines a lot less on this one than she did on the youthful Alright, Still. She actually takes responsibility for her screwups on a couple of tracks ("Back to the Start"), and "Everyone's At It", the album opener, actually recalls The Clash's London Calling. Quite a few tracks recall The Clash, thanks to Allen's similarly diverse mixing of stylistic cues.

She even gets political on the cheerful "Fuck You", telling George Bush to, "Look inside your tiny mind / then look a bit harder" before sending him off with a treacly chorus, "Fuck you / fuck you very, very much. / 'Cause we hate what you do / and we hate your whole crew / so please don't keep in touch." Joni Mitchell it ain't, but from a political standpoint Allen's deliciously tongue in cheeky song is far more effective than the drearily serious screeds Mitchell's been unleashing the past decade or two.

Lily Allen clearly doesn't take herself all that seriously, which is the first prerequisite for growing older with grace, as she seems to be doing on this record. Because of that she won't be afraid to grow and change, which will probably keep her material interesting long after most of her contemporaries have been forgotten.

Verizon customer service is positively Soviet, and their phones all suck, but they've got the best network by far and the prices aren't bad. If the iPhone was available from Verizon, this Verizon customer would buy one in a heartbeat.

God knows the Blackberry Storm proved to be more of a drizzle. In this economy Verizon needs to do something - fast - to keep customers from defecting to AT&T. Because as sorry as AT&T's network is, the iPhone is still a pretty desirable piece of hardware - enough to make me switch sometime this year if Verizon can't offer a comparable device.

Seems to be a disproportionate amount of Blue States who are unable to balance their budgets.

You do know that the Red States, as a group, receive far more money from the Federal government than they pay in taxes, right? Maybe if the Blue States weren't being taxed to death to support layabouts in the Red States, they'd have more money to spend on their own needs . . .

Stephanie has focused too much on the lyric content - which is quite good for pop - and not nearly enough on the music itself. These are catchy, wonderful tunes, perfectly produced. "Chinese" has the sweep of '80s pop from the likes of New Order or Tears for Fears, but it's mated to a deliciously retro, '60s influenced sensibility. The album is largely electronic but it never sounds cold or alienating or mechanical - in fact it often recalls The Beatles at their Rubber Soul thru Magical Mystery Tour zany creative peak, but without ever sounding like a pastiche.

For some reason it also reminds me of The Clash's London Calling in spots, which isn't as ridiculous as it sounds - Joe Strummer was her godfather!

Gwyneth is like something out of the BBC's Posh Nosh:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzjR0yL4f0Y