. . . you are perhaps the least talented writer at Salon and never saw a deep end you didn't want to plunge into whether there was water there or not.

Also, juuust to clarify, I was neither suggesting that Jones actually got a boob job nor that she was "forced into that jacket." -- Tracy C-F

I only write this as a concerned reader because, as we all know, Salon had to make some editorial staff reductions recently and how you made the grade remains a mystery to many regular readers.

As I've asked before, how do you keep your job?

Looks like original equipment to me.

http://www.weddingstand.com/articles/Betty%20Draper%203%20mad%20men.jpg

After all, this is about a soft drink company (unimportant) and their use of Twitter (doubly unimportant).

Salon readers = better than insiders? Miller's Crossing

But called out and beloved by many Salon readers' posts.

But from the shot of the hat blowing across leaves on Miller's Crossing was a shiver up the spine film experience I get maybe twice a decade. -- neumann103

Agreed. I haven't seen No Country For Old Men, but as others pointed out, it's not entirely their movie since it was taken from other source material.

. . . and any over-40 man who thinks about sex in the present tense at all---is probably in need of competent psychiatric treatment.-- Lord Karth

What happen, did it fall off or is the wife really ugly and/or frigid?

Quite true Mr. Leonard so perhaps someone might realize that the opposite could also be true: if the tax burden on our shores was lessened then jobs might be created here. . . .-- savoy-miami

It wouldn't matter if the government actually gave American corporations money, which, of course, it does in the form of farm subsidies, R&D subsidies, and pretty much all defense contracting. American corporation no longer wish to pay a living wage. They won't create jobs here when they can manufacture most consumer goods (70% of our economy now) abroad for pennies an hour.

American corporations should all pay at least 30% and personal income tax needs to be raised on income above $500K a year by at least 10%. Then we need to go to a 60% rate for all income above $5mil a year.

When he talks like this, Rush makes *serious* conservative writers and commentators like Ross Douthat (NYTimes--I'm picking on him because his column today is equal to anything Bill Kristol writes) . . . -- Lucy with Diamonds

So is it that Douthat is as "good" a writer as Kristol or just as much an asshat as Kristol?

See today's Financial Times. Edward Luce, England's own neo-con, and one of the few truly conservative columnists for an otherwise sensible paper, has an article trumpeting Michelle Bachmann as a rising star in American politics. What horse shit.

Luce's cover article is about the dollar as well, thus the Bachmann connection as she is such an expert on currency.

Sired by a Tory politician, Luce has more in common politically with Henry Luce than he does to latter day British conservatives.

. . . too many Islamists and, apparently, most of the students in madras outside of the Arab world are "learning" the Koran in Arabic, though many students may only be marginally literate in their native tongues. The instance of understanding the Koran in Arabic is about the same as "the Church" insisting on Latin for so many centuries, even though historically most of the people who used the language in the "lands of the Bible" were the Romans and their collaborators.

It's all crap anyway, but I just thought I'd point that out.

First off, I start any conversation with religious folks -- the ones that show up at my door every few days, for example -- to come back when they can actually read their texts in original languages and not just English. (This is a place, btw, where Islam is more sophisticated -- while the Koran is still a composite, edited text, it's preserved its contemporaneous language well and the faithful are expected to learn and read the original language; translations 'don't cont'). . . -- inshushinak

. . . and highlights the poverty of their supposed faith ("We know better than Jesus!"), this is nothing new.

I don't have time to read the entirety of articles like this to see if this has been brought up, but the Bible, particularly the New Testament, has been rewritten about five times in the last 1800 years or so. The Vatican has locked away the New Testament as it was compiled in the first 100 years after Christ's time (if ever existed). And remember, he never wrote anything. The whole religion is based on texts conceived at arms length by multiple authors - the Rashomon scriptures.

. . . sculpting mashed potatoes and then a scale model of Devil's Tower.

Everywhere, dude... At the beach, at the supermarket, at the movies, in the confessional and on the toilet... that's a rivalry that just won't quit... Mrs. Bastard's brother made the unforgivable mistake of marrying a very nice gril from Barcelona and I have witnessed some truly insane behavior on both sides.

My personal favorite was the big family pre-wedding dinner where all of La Catalana's family refused to speak Castillian and all of Sra. Bastarda's family refused to speak anything else. So the sister-in-law's familiy was speaking to me in English and making me translate the whole damn thing to the rest of the family - even though everyone else in the room was a much better Spanish speaker than myself. . . -- Unabannable Bastard

But just think what you've done for Spanish and American relations!