My opinion of it? All right: don't you people have enough ways to waste time already?

You know what? No one cares what I'm doing right now, and no one cares what you're doing either. But I can see an up side.

Whenever I'm on public transport, and overhear people talking on their cell phones(for they will not let me not overhear), they're usually speaking of nothing important at all, just random ephemera, often just narrating their trip.

I therefore hope each of these idiots adopts Twitter. They'll still spew out the same stream of trivia, but I won't have to hear it.

After a week of it, go back and read a transcript of what your life was that week. What you thought was important enough to Tweet about anyway.

Then cry.

Because the Republican women you see, the ones allowed to be prominent, represent what the GOP thinks of women. The kind of women you talk about might think for themselves, and they have a few of those(Snowe) but mostly by accident. The GOP wants none of its members thinking for themselves, MOST particularly anyone non-white or non-male, because those are only allowed into the party to provide cover, so they can say, "See? Here's a black man against affirmative action!" or "See? Here's a woman who's against equal pay!" or whatever. I call this the Alan Keyes Law.

So most you see in the media are the Ann Coulter model, and those in Congress are the Katherine Harris model. Bachmann, a shill from her toes to her nose who'll say anything to get ahead in the party, is of the latter type.

They did it to themselves. I agree with this article.

The news became useless and impossible to trust and they just kept going, proclaiming as they slowly rotted that people had an obligation to buy their papers anyway out of a commitment to the principles of journalism, that could only be upheld by the existence of newspapers. We have no duty to support any commercial operation. They have to justify their reason for existence. They nullified it by deciding to be the gatekeepers between us and the truth. I mean a gatekeeper akin to the one in Kafka's THE TRIAL.

They made themselves even worse than useless, collaborating with the Bush administration to confuse and fool us, and on this celebrity thing Sirota says? Just look at any issue of the Chicago Tribune. Hell, look at its site right now. I guarantee at the top somewhere will be some kind of celebrity news. Which is the sort of thing that used to be relegated to the "Living" section or something appropriate like that.

TV did far worse in all this, but newspapers, rather than providing an alternative, became an arm of it. The difference is only that TV still makes money regardless, newspapers have to be bought. So this is really a fate deserved by most of the news establishments, but newspapers are the ones to pay. I think it's unjust that they should be the only ones. But it is chickens coming home to roost.

You could argue that a reason we're all so exhausted, depressed and out of ideas in this country now, why we can't seem to get out of this miasma, is because we ourselves lost our reason to be in the last decade. I doubt we can get it back. What can it be replaced with?

Nobody in Seattle is bothering with the PI's site, because (a)it's always been badly designed and ugly(the Times site is just as bad--in fact, they look a lot alike, except the PI's has more color) and more importantly, (b)it's become an aggregator, not originator. 20 people on a staff is not enough to cover crap. Think of how many of those must be needed for ad sales and technical support and then imagine how many reporters are left there. And add onto that this staff is, reportedly, part-time.

There are older, more trusted aggregators all over the web that people are already loyal to, so what does the PI have to offer? Hearst is well aware that it's slowly killing the PI off entirely.

What this portends isn't pretty, given that, at least in my building, the only paper I ever saw people receiving by sub WAS the PI.

...in which, to keep the brain working, they recommended chewing "Garry Gum." However, one side effect of chewing it was violent diarrhea, so they also recommended chewing, afterward, "ANTI-Garry gum."

Instead of adding another program to keep you from using others, why not just turn the damn thing off for a while?

...but to write an article for a mass audience expressing how you wince when associated with Rush Limbaugh seems a little...well, masochistic is one of a few words to come to mind.

But it's also a way of one getting one's name noticed in association with a more famous person, while attempting to nullify the inevitable negative associations when bringing him up. You may not be able to avoid people you know doing this, but now, assuming enough people read this article, now you mightn't be able to avoid EVERYONE doing it.

I'm sure you love him, and I'm sure he loves you, like most families. But beyond that your point seems to be complete neutrality on him, and I'm not really sure what you're trying to say here. That it sucks to be associated with someone who many intelligent people whose respect you may consider desirable consider evil? I'm sure it does. But, so...?

I mean, I don't really get it. That is: If this isn't opportunism. If it is, then I do.