Talbot, you need to start offering some solid proof - hell, ANY proof - of whay you're accusing Palin of having done. I don't want her or McCain within a hundred yards of the White House, but these more-or-less baseless accusations - always made by sources who do not want to be named - in article after article need to STOP.

You are giving an endless supply of ammunition to the McCain/Palin Campaign. All they need do is come up with a few folks, who are willing to be named, to simply refute these charges in their own words. Most Americans, believe it or not, are not quite as stupid as you think. They'll believe the people who are willing to come forward before they'll believe the people in the shadows.

It's "uninterested."

And are you aware you used the word "gaggle" in each of the first three paragraphs??

Good grief.

I mean, really, we're only living through an historic moment. Britney Spears's tit shot is so much more important.

He dropped fire on civilians - or, as he likes to call them to this day, "gooks" - from 20,000 feet up. Then he got shot down and spent five years as a P.O.W. That's about it. Hardly the stuff of heroism.

You want pain? I'll tell you about pain. Try losing friend after friend, relationship after relationship, because you cannot drive or travel more than 20 miles without a massive panic attack over which you have NO control. Try not being able to go to the movies, when you love cinema, because you have every spatial phobia in the book, including agorophobia. Try having near-attacks every single fucking time you walk outside your goddam door. Hell, sometimes I start to have attacks just watching a sweeping vista in a DVD I'm watching in my fucking living room.

Try sleeping alone night after night after night for DECADES. Try never being invited to ANYTHING. Try loneliness so endless that you actually feel dead already. Try all of that, then try listening to people tell you that it's "just in your head"; that the Klonopin that keeps you employed and off the streets is "long term abuse."

There seems to be truckloads of sympathy for sufferers of depression, but ZIP for the shadowy army of us who suffer from Chronic Panic Disorder (CPD), a neurochemical disorder neither the AMA nor the APA will recognize, labeling it "cognitive", a fancy way of saying...it's all in your head.

I have thought of suicide many, many times. I have fought depression ON TOP OF the CPD. I will never give up if for no other reason to defy the fate that cursed me with this horror show of a life. So you'll excuse me if - along with the literary reasons I mentioned in the comments section of the DFW memorial essay - I have no sympathy for Wallace whatsoever. He took the gift of life and threw it into the face of God; he traumatized his family and friends; he denied his admirers his writing (though in my opinion that, at least, is not such a bad thing). He had every thing a writer could want in this life, and he threw it away to "end the pain." What a coward. May he rest in Hell.

All day long I have been trying to remember what it was about Newman that so often made me feel sad. Then, when I read your letter, it hit me: It was almost thirty years ago that I saw "The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean" for the first time. I was an adolescent, rife with romanticism, and I will never forget how I wept and wept when Newman, playing Bean, sees his dead wife and says with a terrible mixture of sterness and grief, "I won't have it. Ya' hear me, I WON'T HAVE IT!" Only a truly great actor could have pulled that off, and Newman was that and so much more. My heart goes out to Joanne Woodward, as my heart went out to Hume Cronyn when Jessica Tandy passed away.

It was the mid-80s, as I recall, that he consented to be interviewed by Barbara Walters. Knowing almost nothing about him aside from his movie roles and how much I liked them, I had no idea how unusual it was for him to do such an interview.

Walters, in her inimitable style, asked an incredibly stupid question, followed by one that was even worse but that Newman answered calmly and quietly but with a look on his face that seemed to ask "Lady, are you from fucking MARS??" To wit (verbatim from memory):

WALTERS: I understand you don't give autographs. Why is that?

NEWMAN: I just think it's a bit presumptuous on my part to think that my signature is worth something.

WALTERS: So when someone comes up to and asks for an autograph, what do you say?

NEWMAN (comes the look!): I say, 'I'm sorry but I don't give autographs.'

In the modern idiom, Walters was owned, and by one of the smartest, funniest, warmest persons ever to grace the screen. I will miss him.

After all these years, Tina Fey is finally funny. Well, kudos on that.

Please do not EVER compare Dana Carvey's brilliance to Tina Fey's mediocrity. Thanks.

And the salient point of Rebecca's essay is that Palin CHOSE THIS. And she should never be allowed to forget it.

I'm reading far too much on-line - especially from Karl Denninger and Rhoubini - eloquently and logically explaining the fool-hardiness of the bailout to lend it any credence whatsoever. It is nothing more or less than the biggest act of extortion in the history of the United States. Probably in the history of the world as well.

No one who can write as well as you do can possibly believe the horseshit you're shoveling around here. The Presidency of the United States "isn't exactly rocket science"??

Please.