RUKidding me hits on an important point here. If I were Bush, so utterly despised and criminally implicated,and therefore protective of my "privacy," I would have gotten a different job. When you're the frikking PRESIDENT, you don't have the luxury of privacy. Nothing you do is "personal." Paging Bill Clinton?

It's despicable and risibly hypocritical that these sociopaths proudly talk about the importance of "privacy," all the while declaring that everyone else deserves none such thing.

Would that instead of "real" journalists like Klein, we simply had video clippers who placed all statements on a given topic together, using the google, and ran them unedited.

Thus, we'd have "a wiretap requires a warrant" juxtaposed with the subsequent statements attempting to justify the opposite, and on and on.

What "journalists" do these days, is patiently and windily explain to the benighted why down is up and black is white, ala Klein, the "analysts," et al.

Nothing else matters unless this pattern is stopped.

PS.. Pedinska and Quickstrategy, I propose changing the name of the heretofore "EWWW" Award to QS's "Hurl Check." You both are in the running, so you pick.

Quickstrategy, I long for that icon on my keyboard, too. There are a couple of blank keys; shall I go to MacForce and see what they can do? Anyway, I was naturally (and delightedly) peeking out between the fingers covering my eyes when the Eww/Hurl topics were being discussed, and my fainting couch managed to remain undented. I just liked your name better, and I did want to hurl, so I thought it fit.

Pedinska, I like Hurl Check because unlike "Ewww," it avoids anything that activates the spell check, and although I'm generally in favor of onomatopoeias, I prefer that they have an agreed-upon spelling. Also, "hurl" seems much more dramatic and urgent than a mere "ewww."

Thanks, QS...

As I'm sure you know by now, that fainting couch is seldom ever pressed into service; the cushions remained unflattened. Hurling occurs in another room.

Jebbie... I thought of you today; on Thom Hartmann's radio program, they had a sex worker advocate, whose name was "Audacia" on and she spoke eloquently about the rights of sex workers. Thom, always an advocate of organized labor, asked if hookers like Audacia had ever tried to organize, and she mentioned a group called "Prostitute of New York." aka PONY.

Jebbie, actually, Pedinska and I have never knowingly collaborated on a post, although to a casual observer it might appear that way., because after all great minds do think alike. I just thought of you because, after all this talk of ponies, I found a group with the treasured acronym, and the cause was so funny and unwittingly apropos. Who knew that NY hookers also were wishing for a PONY, perhaps even more fervently than you?

I guess you shoulda been there.

The subject today, which is now depressingly familiar, is the continuing degradation and subsequent demise of print media as the vehicle the founders intended for the political discourse democracy requires, which now seems a distant memory.

In a futile, relentless, and ultimately self-defeating pursuit of a "readership" resolutely hostile to actual reading, the heedless, Epimethean corporations that now have absorbed our "free press" have chosen to cheapen their "product," appealing to the "Survivor" set, rather than realizing the simple fact that in so doing they lose the faithful and render useless the higher knowledge that is really their only selling point in a fast-paced, dumbed-down world.

As Anonymust pointed out, the futility of making the product cheesy and indistinguishable from the offerings excreted by their broadcast brethren, even great newspapers relinquish their reason to exist, not to mention any residual prestige they may have retained from the past. And I would add to WT's thought that Sulzberger ought go about in disguise, that his rag no longer carries any whiff of erudition the reader might hope to gain from familiarity with it. It's the readers who need a disguise. Maybe hide your NYT under a copy of People. To have one's intelligence insulted repeatedly by nearly every writer on the op-ed page with utter falsehoods, rote dismissals of actual thinkers like Chomsky, always based on the ignorant and arrogant assumption that the reader doesn't know better, is to ask for the shovel to dig your newspaper's grave. The pursuit of "balance," which is currently fashionable but absurdly indifferent to truth, appeals only to those too addlepated and dumb to read a newspaper anyway. Does anyone who believes a word Kristol types spend $1.25 and a half hour reading anything, except perhaps on the toilet?

Nice business plan. Why not market mink coats to PETA?

PS... Bahhummingbug.. I'm glad to know that I've still got you, and your gun, where I want you. What are you pouring tonight?