Does anyone know if bookings for the Daily Show/Colbert Report can be influenced by viewers emailing the producers or whoever?

IMHO Glenn's a natural fit for these shows. I've seen some episodes where the guest authors had written a fairly esoteric non-fiction title. So a book about the crisis brought upon this country by the Bush administration isn't too far out in left field, at all.

I just took a look at the website you referenced and have to say, it's very bizarre in one respect that I noticed right away.

From the Homepage it's pointed out that he/she isn't a Dem/Repub/Ind but only an American concerned about the country. Yet, nearly all the complaints, rants, etc, do nothing but paint Democrats, the anti-war movement, etc as fools and appeasers and other choice terms.

Why is that?

If someone wants honest dialog to hopefully come to some mutual understanding, you don't start off by rampant hysterical name calling.

Personally, IMO you and your site smell like typical RW wingnut bullshit.

And, lacking such an inner core of indentity and humanity, I think that Bush has struggled his whole life to fill it with something more easily obtainable and immediately gratifying. E.g. abusing alcohol and drugs, ridiculing less advantaged people, attaching himself to powerful people, pursuing quixotic adventures for which he had no actual talent, and, as governor and now president, wielding and abusing the enormous power that came with these positions in order to feed his megalomaniacal urges, which stem from, I think, this inner emptiness.

You've pretty much just described the core of "addiction/alcoholism" as it is currently understood and treated via many rehabs and nearly all 12-step programs that base their precepts on the original 12-Steps and 12-Traditions of AA.

Many people have the incorrect idea that AA and other programs push a Christian-based God and world view, which just isn't true at all. The two primary ideas setup in the Big Book of AA are:

1] God as you understand him/her/it.

and more importantly ...

2] That you (the addict/alcoholic) isn't god.

As some one who's been in recovery for 15+ years I've seen many, many people get hung up on these two points, causing endless pain and suffering for themselves and others.

I note these points only because I personally often wondered if GWB received some bad guidance when he first got "sober" and that now the country is paying the price. And since he isn't really sober, in the sense as dictated by AA, he's still trying to fill that hole you so eloquently noted.

Slightly OT I suppose, and I apologize to the group. It's just something I've thought about since I first read that Bush is an alcoholic and seeing your post it brought all my thoughts back concerning it.

I'm not an expert nor do I play one on television, but I am an IT professional. Taking a quick look at the source code of the "Send a letter to the editor" page shows that it is auto-generated and makes heavy use of CSS and Javascript (not Java; for the uninitiated Java and Javascript have next to nothing in common except 4 alpha characters) and IMHO it would be relatively easy to modify the script or webserver configuration to disable allowing for Anonymous postings.

Further, the source of the page shows auto-generated but hardcoded relative pathing to unique and specific directories for the whole shebang. As an example:

/opinion/greenwald/2007/06/21/podhoretz/

So Salon's hosting service isn't doing what so many others do. That is, a webserver and assorted scripting, etc generating random numerical strings and building/assigning them to the various articles, etc as a URL that make up a web site. Meaning, in many cases there's no easy way to differentiate content from one section of the site from the other due to all URLs being auto-generated on the fly on the webserver.

They could probably disable the option or simply build the HTML for the page, leaving off the option completely. Ultimately nothing on the backend would need changing, simply a CSS file or some such would need to be dropped into the root of /greenwald/ and all forward directories would reflect the change.

YMMV, and of course IMHO

:-)

Thanks for the kind thought Kitt, but unfortunately I doubt very much that Salon has an actual IT staff overseeing the operations of their hardware and software infrastructure. IMHO chances are they use an external firm which runs a web development business, which includes a server farm. They would be the ones who do all the heavy lifting with regard to support and development.

If anything, there's a few lowly support/admin types at Salon's primary location. They would be tasked with a few, very select functions, using assorted HTML-based tools to access the remote servers, with severely limited-rights to the whole operation. It would all depend on what was more expensive. Having the hosting company run all administrative/support tasks, or taking on the salaries of a few support people. Plus, of course what kind of turnaround time would be promised by the company. That's a very important metric in the business. It could be that Salon likes the idea of being able to create/modify/delete accounts, etc in a more timely fashion than what their supplier could guarantee.

One thing I feel pretty sure of though, is none of the automated procedures put in place are 100% reliable enough to have it be a completely "hands off" operation. That's one of the dirty little secrets of the computer age I've seen over the years. Users see everything just working, not realizing that behind the scenes are a whole army of IT specialists keeping the gears turning in some manner.

I could go on, but I'd only bore the ass off the readers ...

:-)