If it was intentional, of course it's racist. If it wasn't, it shows they're (by they I meant the producer and anyone else who didn't think anything was wrong with it) racist and comfortable with their racism.

In my personal experience, many whites are racist, many blacks are racist, many Asians are racist, etc. Racism is a "normal" childish reaction to people of other races. Real adults work to overcome it, (all too many) others are comfortable with it; these folks are definitely in the second category, the kind of people who'd reply "but some of my best friends are negroes" without any irony.

This attitude, this childishness, and the lowering of journalistic standards to allow all kinds of mushy, incoherent, thinking and vague, ambiguous, poorly thought-out language to fill our airwaves, is simply a part of the long-term intellectual and emotional neoteny of our culture, especially our political culture. There's no doubt that TV has played a huge role in this; thus amongst "developed" nations we have, in my experience, the least sophisticated political discourse, or close to it (Japan, another hooked-on-TV culture, is bad too).

None of this will change until we, collectively, turn of our TVs; that's the ultimate boycott of this whole culture. You may rail at Fox, but then you change the channel and laugh at a rerun of "Friends." That makes you a part of the problem.

And no, I don't own a TV; never have.

This isn't about the article, but about the "Montana" ad that is covering part of the first paragraph. It's hard to read the article that way. Even resignedly clicking on the ad in the hope it would go away failed to kill it.

salon.com's a great site in many ways but I'm frankly getting sick of the growing number of intrusive ads here. I must have gingerly avoided the Amy Sedaris video ad for months, failing often in fact and having it jump out into the text I was trying to read.

Oh, and just to the right of this comment box----> a car ad. I don't think salon.com editors have every seen a car ad they didn't like. I'm sure more than once my reading an article on the environment on this site has required me to endure an ad for some gas-guzzling sexy car or SUV first. This is such arch hypocrisy, and it doesn't seem necessary for salon.com to take ads from all and sundry to survive when it's also a membership site. How can other sites with equally worthy content but less flashy graphics survive but salon.com can't?

We can talk politics all day but nothing will really change in this country until "progressives" give up their bourgeois wet dreams and stop patronizing the corporations that feed them and the websites that pimp these corps' 19th-century products.

End of rant.

I mean that double-entendre. Liberals as a mind-set need to realize a couple of things:

One, generally, countries whose governments don't allow their citizems have the individual right to bear arms also allow them few freedoms. I'm not speaking of handguns, that is a bit of a separate issue, but guns in general. So it's wise from the get-go to make it clear that handguns not long guns, per se, are the focus of controls.

Two, familiarity with guns will be useful, since the "other side of the debate" has this familiarity already. When journalists make elementary mistakes about firearms--using "large-caliber" for "high-powered" and "machine gun" for "assault rifle" they reveal an ignorance of them that in the minds of gun-savvy people discredits their opinions. If the differences I just mentioned seem inconsequential to you, then you've helped me prove my point: to gun people they're not, and they don not--again, generally--respect the opinions of anyone who confuses such terms.

There's an example of this above:

"Rifles can easily be used for home defense, but they're nearly impossible to conceal in public."

Wrong. Shooting a rifle, which unless it's a .22 is by definition a high-powered rifle, can send a small-caliber but very high-velocity bullet through numerous walls, ending up, say, in your neighbor's kid's head. Not good. A pistol bullet is usually bigger caliber but is travelling much slower and so will be stopped by walls (see the cailber/power difference?) That's why rifles are NOT good for home defense. They're also hard to move around indoors, a potentially fatal drawback for the person wielding one, so by no means are they "good for home defense."

In any case I suggest anti-gun folks take Henry David Thoreau's advice to heart and familiarize themselves with firearms.

As to the 2nd Amendment protecting only organized militias, here's Himmler on that topic:

"Germans who wish to use firearms should join the SS or the SA - ordinary citizens don't need guns, as their having guns doesn't serve the State"

On the other hand:

The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword, because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops ...

Noah Webster

When you disarm your subjects you offend them by showing that either from cowardliness or lack of faith, you distrust them; and either conclusion will induce them to hate you.

Niccolo Machiavelli

And if either of these sentiments seem quaint and outdated, consider that Iraq has shown that a relatively small but determined group of armed individuals can effectively stymie the world's #1 army; a horrible reality for our troops, but a comforting thought should NORTHCOM become something other than a defensive command....

209 days, and counting, on that expiration of that possibility....let's hope.