It is common these days for bloggers to beat up on the main-stream media for not doing a very good job and Joan W. and Greenwald are good examples of such. However, more and more media outlets are "selling" their product for "free" so there is less and less income available to fund truly aggressive media activities. As a result, most stuff that is published is merely being repackaged from a central source that does all the hard work in researching issues, etc. etc. The NYT is one of the few remaining journalistic organizations that does original work and everybody relies on them for their daily feeds.

Basically, we are getting what we pay for which is becoming less and less. And the blogs are no substitutes for fair and balanced journalism because they are 99% opinion and 1% new information of which .5% is actually useful.

That is exactly my point...we could become intellectually lazy unable to separate fact from fiction (Bushies take note), particulary those under 30 who have never subscribed to a newspaper, bought a magazine or a NON-fiction book in their lives. As a society, we will have become accustomed to paying nothing for our daily "information" needs. In the long-run, society will become "dumbed-down" because everyone is buried with "free" data and cannot find any real information. Intentionally or unintentionally, little or nothing is put into context other than by the partisan blogs, which also pass as propaganda (Greenwald take note). Basically, we will have become "uneducated" without even knowing it.

How can Hillary play hard-ball against Obama when Bill Clinton enjoys 95% approval ratings among African Americans? Bill won't stand for it as he needs to protect a key part of his legacy including being the "first black president". Instead, Hillary should remind voters that electing Obama could result in a Jimmy Carter fiasco.

Hillary has played her campaign nice-and-safe for the past year due to her presumed front-runner status. She was thinking ahead to the general election and did nothing to better define who she really is. She considered Obama to be a light-weight a la Howard Dean and Edwards to be a nuisance running for VP again. Now she finds out these guys are actually good and are playing for keeps and she is clueless. Her main error is that more people know what these guys stand for than we know about Hillary. She did not want to show off her "negatives" until 2008, as a result, these guys have out-flanked her on every issue. Once again, a major democratic candidate fails to deliver on the campaign trail.

Remember GWB punished John McCain in South Carolina in 2000 right after McCain had the gall and temerity to beat Bush by 18% in NH. the dems don't possess the same instincts as the repugs and it shows up on election days.

I have not read the book but the author and the Salon writer seem intent on justifying the intellectual aspects of totalitarian regimes. Facsists regimes are assigned most of the responsibility for the genocide that became WWII but Stalin executed over 30M in his own right. Nobody knows how many people perished under Mao during roughly the same period. The bottom line is that over 100M perished under totalitarian regimes from 1920-1960. This period gave meaning to the term "ethnic cleansing". I don't understand how these facts support any other conclusion ohter than that the mid-20th century was a perod of enormous evil.

Writers can parse words about national socialism, holistic nonsense and whatever, but in the end, Hitler was all about blonde, blue-eyed pure German lineage, more German living space, and a military machine that would carry out his racial policies against Jews, gypsies, the mentally ill and homosexuals. Oddly enough, his biggest supporters were the professional classes and the intellectuals of the time who bought into the notion of German living space and racial purity and provided their expertise to the cause.

The historical record also shows that Hitler hated the Bolsheviks more than any other political group because they were so heavily underwritten and influenced by Jews and it did not help that they were also Slavs. Despite a political alliance with Stalin in 1939-41, Hitler had every intention of invading Russia and wiping out the Bolshevik-Jewish connection.

In today's world, it is hip to assign fascist labels to Bush, church-goers, red staters, but I would suggest that this is a lame attempt to misinform the uninformed and amuse the informed.

American politics has never quite recovered from Roe v. Wade. Politics did recover from the Vietnam war, Watergate, maybe even 9/11 although it may be too early to say for sure, but the body politic has never gotten past the legalization of abortion. It is still the primary litmus test for party purity. Every serious candidate has to state unequivocally where he or she stands on abortion rights and there is little or no wiggle room. Consequently, there is no negotiation, no compromise, no common ground on this subject. Essentially, abortion rights is the single most divisive issue in politics today. Illegal immigration, the Iraq war or even social security are a "walk on the beach" compared to the politics of abortion. In fact there really are no politics on the subject because all the abortion headlines emanate from the courts, then the ruling judges become the unelected political surrogates.

How did all of this evolve? The civil rights movement is credited with the impetus to Roe v. Wade, and rather quickly, political discourse crossed over into the realm of the "personal". Essentially, the reality that "all politics are local" morphed into "all politics are personal" and that is where we are today, 35 years later.