in "stalking".

And as to the others complaining about Keillor's torture apologia, it seems everyone defending him on that hasn't bothered to read it, either. It's simply the most horrifying thing I could ever imagine coming from him, as if Mark Twain had written "The White Man's Burden" instead of "The War Prayer".

I have a hard enough time with Andrew Leonard's self-indulgent "How The World Works" column, but this? An essay on Jennifer Aniston that doesn't even mention her sizable role in Office Space, which for me established her comic chops (though others will rightly point out they were established elsewhere). Aniston is an actress with above-average talent that sometimes comes out in films and sometimes doesn't. Is this just jealousy talking because she continues to get (and earn, by the way) A-list creative fees?

Blah blah blah prototypes are expensive blah blah blah economies of scale blah blah blah gimme subsidies now. In other words, the same song and dance every other utopian energy production scheme runs with.

Try again, and thank you for playing. At this point, virtually all criticism of Obama (who has done almost nothing for gays) is legitimate.

Agree with others who say the kid is heading to young pregnancy or worse, and with those who say the parents need to straighten themselves out. Yelling? Not getting it done.

One of the worst columns I've read from Cary, and there have been some really awful ones lately.

Garrison, you've jumped, not only the shark, but the entire Pacific Ocean. Congratulations on joining the ranks of the depraved.

You killed PalmOS, and you lost me as a customer forever.

but seriously, how much of this nonsense would be happening if the government were a hundredth of its current size?

Asked later about his proposal to cut the percentage of charitable donations the wealthiest taxpayers can deduct from their taxes, Obama spun it cleverly. "If you give $100 and you're in this tax bracket, at a certain point, instead of being able to write off 36 percent or 39 percent, you're writing off 28 percent," he said. "Now, if it's really a charitable contribution, I'm assuming that that shouldn't be the determining factor as to whether you're giving that $100 to the homeless shelter down the street." He cast the debate entirely on his own terms, and managed to make wealthy donors who object to his plan seem cheap in the process.

Of course, this utterly fails to consider the fact that while the government can just magically raise more money by increasing taxes, individuals can't. The pool of money available for charity is fixed and growing smaller, and this kind of facile "analysis" helps no one.

I've been thinking about going back to AT&T now that they're the exclusive distributor of iPhones; friends who have them say they're great. I used to be an LA Cellular customer, but once AT&T bought out the Pac*Bell half of that company, customer service was a simple upraised middle finger. I've been with Verizon since 2004, and while I love the idea of a smart phone, I found the Blackberry Storm underwhelming.

One of the worst features of Bill Clinton's presidency was how malleable he was in the face of some of the worst impulses. As the ACLU website makes clear

http://www.aclu.org/safefree/extraordinaryrendition/22203res20051206.html

extraordinary rendition got its gruesome start during his administration (as did the requirements making centralized nationwide wiretapping both possible and mandatory). There's plenty of blood on Democratic hands -- not that this is exculpatory for the Republicans by any means, because they vastly expanded these wrongs -- but it will prove politically difficult to rid the country of extraordinary rendition and all its lawless brethren because of that complicity.

For 65 years libertarians and conservatives have mocked FDR's vision, either as a utopian dream or a sinister collectivist plot. But they have lost the argument.

Yes, because Fabian socialism made India so rich, and communism was such a smashing success in China and Russia.