who wrote:

Here's my new definition of "Middle Aged"...young enough to be reading Salon, old enough to be completely repulsed by the previous Broadsheet post, "Generation XXX: Having sex like porn stars."

Oh, I dunno. You have to admit, if you're going to have sex like porn stars, doing it from about ages 16 to 25 is probably the best time for it. After that? It's harder to maintain the fantasy, I would think. Over 40? forget it. Lots of sex to be had over 40, and good sex too, but there won't be any porn stars in that mirror...

right...yeah. A blogger from *National Review* is accusing someone of being an intellectual lightweight?

Excuse me while I go laugh until I pass out.

After reading too much Caitlin Flanagan, and reading even more analysis and criticism of her work here and elsewhere, I come away with the unshakable conviction that she is profoundly hung-up in certain ways. It seems she either found one of those self-improvement-style shrinks who told her that all her opinions were the right ones and she should just "be herself" no matter what...or, she is in really desperate need of a good shrink for about 3 years..or both.

Her black/white world seems very unpleasant. She seems very unpleasant. People are complicated. Their emotions and actions that follow from those emotions are complicated. And sometimes motivations are nowhere near as clear-cut as Flanagan seems to think they are.

She is plain weird, is all I can say.

He never should have taken single-payer off the table.

That's one move I'll never understand. Why give up a perfectly good bargaining chip for absolutely nothing? Makes no sense.

I'm not sure single-payer is the best method of providing health-care insurance, but Medicare-for-All sounds intuitively plausible, even if all the Dems are total cowards about raising taxes to pay for it.

So, why Obama didn't just START with "Medicare for All" I'll never know. That would have been one powerful tactic. Since so many people have Medicare already, there's no way the Noise Machine could have ginned up much of anything against it, other than trying to defend the notion that rich people and corporations shouldn't have to help pay for it. I would have loved to see them try to defend rich people and corporations against taxation to provide Medicare-for-All.

Of course, Medicare-for-All would likely have required a middle-class tax-hike, or a surtax, like the one we pay for Social Security, but it probably wouldn't have been much money per capita, and could have been sold, even over the Right Wing Noise Machine. It was foolish cowardice not to try it. Don't you think most people would have been thrilled to have high-quality medical care for free, no questions asked, in return for a small surtax on income? I think they would have. It's a very simple sale. And the Right would have choked on its own bile.

This thing has not been handled correctly at all. But something good may come of it yet. Something we can work with as time goes on. Taking Medicare-for-All off the table was a profound mistake, but it doesn't have to be off the table forever.

I don't know if we can ever defeat the right-wing, royalist power residing in big American corporations, but we'll have to keep trying, because otherwise the American Experiment is over.

so. We can't afford to pay for health-care for all our citizens, but we CAN give untold billions to rich people in tax breaks; we can give huge tax breaks to corporations; we can afford to give a TRILLION dollars to Wall Street to bail out their asses; we can afford two wars of choice against countries that neither attacked us nor threatened us..that bill will come to over 3 TRILLION bucks after all is said and done; we can afford by far the biggest defense budget of any nation on earth, for weapons we don't need, to kill people who have done nothing to us...

I could go on. But I suppose you think that we should afford all those things, but quality health-care for all, guaranteed? Nope. Can't afford that.

Tell me...any of your employees ever call you an ass? I imagine, probably not. But, believe me, they're calling you that in private.

You're a joke. A bad joke. But a joke. Quit watching Fox..that might help. a little.

I'm guessing your friends won't tell you--assuming you have some--but to judge by your posts, liberty, you are in real need of professional help. I suggest you get some.

Mr. Lind, you need to think that one over.

Because those "erring neighbors" have been making the same error for over 40 years. Their most recent lovely error was being the base that elected Shrub to eight disasterous years in office.

So, tell me, if after 40 years the South continues to send profoundly cynical, or just plain crazy people to congress, and continues to vote for disasterously incompetent or destructive national leaders, how are we to "correct them"? two, three, four generations of white southerners have been instrumental in the right-wing project to destroy the country our founders were trying to make. Pray tell, just how long are we supposed to tolerate that, without finally saying, ENOUGH, hm? How long do we tolerate the "intellectual laziness" that bids fair to ruin this country in a way even the Civil War never did?

I'm not in a forgiving mood. Haven't been since Watergate, actually. There's no excuse for what Southern voters have been doing for three generations now. None.