You are of course correct. I was just ranting on a bit, though I have read some incredibly misguided PC nonsense related to off-shoring from people who were ostensibly progressive. This was particularly true at the now-defunct Your-Job-Is-Going-To-India.com It was also there that I read excuse after excuse proferred by Indians who claimed that, while it was true their senior software developers were every bit as good as ANYBODY in the U.S. well, uh...NO, actually, they couldn't really develop their own software products and subsequent businesses to compete with U.S. companies.

But then I don't blame them. If I were any of them, I'd sure as shit take the jobs. A lot of misinformed people lament the "poor, underpaid" Indian engineers "only" getting paid, say, $12,000 a year. What they don't know is that $12,000 American is about 500,000 rupees. And since India has gotten its inflation under control, 500,000 rupees per year buys about as much as $500,000 does here. In Mumbai (formerly Bombay) and Bangalore huge "McMansion developments" are springing up, along with luxury condos and apartments with every emenity imaginable. And on the job? Well, remember how during the Dotcomm Boom there were all these companies with playrooms, on-sight gyms, and so forth?

Child's play.

"60 Minutes" did a report three years ago about off-shoring, in which they were given a tour of one of the companies that had sprung up since off-shoring began. You had to see it to believe it, even on videotape. The gym was - well, I think you'd have to go to Beverly Hills to find a gym like that: Two Olympic-sized swimming pools, dozens of machines, dozens of free-weight stations, saunas, hot tubs, massage rooms (!) with, of course, on-site masseuses and masseurs. Then there was the "cafeteria." I put the word in scare quotes because it served gourmet-quality food breakfast, lunch and dinner.

And the employees needn't worry about their commute, because the company ran a shuttle service to and from EACH EMPLOYEE'S HOUSE OR APARTMENT AND BACK AGAIN. I mean...what the fuck??

Am I jealous? Hell NO. That kind of ostentation makes my butt itch, but more importantly these Indian companies are pissing away money faster than the most egregious Dotcomm ever did. It's nuts, especially considering that other Asian countries are challenging them in the cheap labor department. But one thing is for certain: I now know where all their potential R & D money went.

And people say Americans in the 50s and 60s were living in a "capitalist fool's paradise." Bah!

Oh yeah, I forgot. The Michaels-Brillstein-Grey Axis. The Gweat and Tewwible!!

...they have PRECISELY the same I.Q.s as the bunnies, so they are lingual symbiotes.

John Edwards - Conscientious, desirous of high, public office to effect needed change.

Mitt Romney - Privileged prick who believes high, public office is his birthright.

Who to choose...?

Whooooo toooooo chooooooooose......?

That, or Maher wisely sends the least funny bits so as to have his cake and eat it too.

About ten years ago I read an op-ed in my local, right-wing rag. It, like this sonorous piece of nonsense, attacked Henry David Thoreau, and for the same reason. At the time I recognized the screed as yet another entry in the Long March of Reactionary Zealotry then in the process of achieving what it has now obtained - absolute cultural and political power. So Keillor really has jumped the shark. No, I take that back. He hasn't jumped the shark.

He's jumped the Snake River Canyon without a fucking parachute.

Gee, perhaps the reason Thoreau gave that advice is because, having followed it himself, he knew that he had managed to write Walden's Pond and great-grandfather the environmental movement. Could that be it? And could it be that he believed that other young men and women, if they heard that different drummer, might also do great things? Oh, perish the thought.

Wanting to do great things, and doing them, is a large part of what America is all about, you nitwit. Being voted Most Popular at the Prom is the opposite of what America is all about. Try and remember that...and that the Nazis put on some awesome parades.

You know...the boring kind. It's a shame, really. He was once the best writer on the Left, period. And his rhetorical donnybrooks with Alexander Cockburn in the Letters to the Editor section of The Nation were the journalistic equivalent of "The Rumble in the Jungle." And if he keeps it up with the booze, he's going to wind up just like Ali but without the fame.

I knew I was backing the right candidate!

Well, there's no accounting for taste...or a lack thereof. Molly Shannon couldn't even keep a straight face during SNL's now-legendary "Pete Scwetty's Christmas Balls" segment. Then again neither could Ana Gasteyer, another cement head from the Tina Fey Years. Thank God for Alec Baldwin's professionalism and a premise that even Chris Kattan couldn't have blown.