This should be a political ad in 2008. I've always thought ads that wave the flag and yammer about America and hope this and tradition that were all a waste of air and effort. I want ads that present the facts, all nice and linked up like this article. Glenn's question at the end, "conspiracy or ineptitude?" would even be a great tagline. Come on, Move On, make the ad!

"Pay no attention to the man behind the cretin." Brilliant!!!

In older times, Buddhist monks were never allowed to touch any woman after they had taken the robes. One day, two traveling monks were walking along a rain-swollen stream, looking for a safe place to cross. They met a beautiful young woman, alone, stranded by the water and unable to cross by herself. One monk said, "Come here, miss," lifted her up in his arms, carried her across the stream safely, set her down, bowed, and continued on his way. This greatly bothered the other monk, but he said nothing until much later, when they had finally reached the abbey. At last, the second monk said, "You know you violated your vows when you touched that beautiful girl back there. How could you be so casual about it?" The first monk said, "I put the girl down back there. Are you still carrying her?"

As soon as the stared-at chick is past his field of vision, he forgets she exists. Talk about it with him, sure, but I'm surprised at the amount of anger and accusations this has, well, engendered.

Some excellent choices here. I vote for:

Your Constitution Needs You. Vote Democrat.

Feel Proud Again. Vote Democrat.

Democrats in 08: We'll be greeted as liberators

What's our government been doing? Vote Dem and find out.

...especially if they make a behemoth SUV like the Escalade or the Denali:

Jagannath: a form of the diety Krishna, from which we get the word "juggernaut."

Another couple of perfect, if ironic SUV names:

Samsara: this world of suffering and desire in which we live (from which enlightenment is an escape) -- if you drive an SUV you are pretty much announcing to the world that you are completely, blindly mired in samsara;

KARMA: what you'll reap if you buy a gas-guzzling SUV.

As for "Appalachia," I'm a loving but realistic native of just that region, and I know perfectly well it conjures up toothless, overall-wearing, moonshine-drinking, gun-and-Confederate-flag-waving, toothless hillbillies. A little more than the coal-mining and topography Salon was polite enough to mention. Not that it's a realistic image of our beautiful land, but I know it's the image many truck buyers would have.

...isn't that Huckabee believes this idiocy. It's that millions and millions of other people do. Sure, we could mail these manifestos of crazy to voters in battleground states, but you know what? Some would be reading it, nodding their empty heads happily, and then they would go out and vote for him, because they LIKE all this stuff. That horrifies me.

However, I DO like the idea of reporters asking Huckabee (repeatedly, until he's forced to answer) if he really believes in the death penalty for gay adulterers like Ted Haggerty, Mark Foley, Larry Craig, and others, or that slavery is okay (as it is in Leviticus and tacitly in Paul's letters), or that our justice system should start putting out eyes and knocking out teeth and chopping off hands.

But the investigative media died on 9/11, and we're the only people left who still mourn them.

Actually, I think "Life After People" is not so much inspired by "I Am Legend" as it is by the wonderful book _The World Without Us_, which was profiled here on Salon at its publication.

I've always thought, though, that television runs on memes (obviously). For a while, it was all about vampires -- Buffy, Angel, movies, and tons of History/Travel/Discovery Channel "documentaries." Then it was all ghosts, all the time. Lately, appallingly considering that it happened after 9/11, there's been a spate of mega-disaster shows. Hell, even the Weather Channel got into the act. What is Yellowstone became a megavolcano again? What if an F5 tornado hit Dallas? What if San Francisco has another great quake?

Now the meme is "global human extinction." Don't worry, it'll be Nostradamus again soon enough.