preferably during RAGBRAI. Pie is the de facto official dessert, snack food and I'm sure occasional main dish. I heartily recommend the rhubarb-strawberry in season (which coincides with the bikefest). See ya then.

A. Obama is making a classic liberal mistake. Reaching out to the Right won't get him anywhere. Those people don't like him and don't think they need him. Giving them anything is just an encouragement to take, then wait to take more.

B. The Left, including LBGTT or whatever the acronym is this week, has nowhere to go. They'll continue to support Obama until he appoints Karl Rove Minister of Communication. Judging by the response from the Right, Warren may be damaged far more, and the Right nicely divided. Good choice.

C. The controversy has fully alerted two of the most uncompromising groups on the American scene: extreme gay activists and extreme antiabortionists. Apart from their neverending anger and sorrow, they have one thing in common: nothing can ever be done to write the terrible, murderous, criminal injustice that has been inflicted upon the world. Nothing.

You can't really blame Obama for wanting to get past the futile self-serving headbanging that passes for political dialogue. You can blame those who are focused on an Inaugural prayer for diverting attention from the lack of economic and policy reform shown by Obama's Cabinet and staff appointments. This will be forgotten or remembered humorously. We'll have to live with Obama's same ol' just the way we had to live with Bush and Clinton. And that's a tragedy to be remembered.

This is the same Fox affiliate that said on Tuesday that Emmanuel had blown the whistle on Blago to Fitzgerald, the FBI or both, a claim that was shot down within twenty-four hours. Now they're hinting he was in collusion. What's coming tomorrow -- Rahm fathered Blago's lovechild?

and the best laugh I've had since Roddy B tried to sell Obama's Senate seat. (Ah, our yesterdays! Oh, that was yesterday.)

Looks like betoma the Clothes lady has you typed pretty well. "Are second-wave feminists even more thin-skinned and irritable than Joe Wurzelbacher?" Yeah, so it would seem. “I think this woman is engaged in a strong misreading.” Pretty much sums up Broadsheet, which unfortunately represents a thumbnail of Salon these days. Saddest of all is the spot-on skewering of those who can't stand the slightest deviation from their idea of how others should think. No tolerance, no humor, no humanity. What a cold little world. Wonder what Blago's doin'?

A few observations, corrections, though:

I don't think Chuck Berry actually sued the Beach Boys over "Surfin' USA/Sweet Little Sixteen." The story I heard (probably from the BBs' biography) was that Berry's lawyers asked for cowriter credit for Berry on the album, cowriter's royalties on all copies sold and legal fees but no punitive damages, a deal the Boys wisely accepted. Berry, being in the business, didn't want to destroy a new group with their first hit.

The Chess brothers were like virtually every other white producer dealing with black musicians in the Fifties and Sixties; they stole everything the could from artists who were more familiar with music than business. Ray Charles was the first to break the pattern when he moved from the musically pioneering, financially embezzling race label Atlantic to mainstream ABC on his own terms, as shown in "Ray." Ruth Brown, Atlantic's number one artist in the Forties and early Fifties who had descended to cleaning houses by Sixties, led the fight in court to recover royalties for herself and many other swindled artists. As Zacharek says, it's a complicated story; producers like Chess, John Hammond and Atlantic's Ahmet Ertegun promoted black music relentlessly, often at personal cost but then stole everything they could and frequently misrepresented the artists as more backwoods than they often were.

Not surprised the filmmakers chose not to cover Bo Diddley, who's such a complex artist he deserves a movie of his own. Too bad he didn't live to see it; British artists like Eric Clapton, Pete Townsend, Ron Wood and Jeff Beck valued Diddley above most of his contemporaries. As Bo said, "I opened the door and all these white boys came charging through."

And no mention of Willie Dixon in the article. He's usually cited as the genius behind Chess, with one foot in the white business world and another in the blues and a separate career in the more sophisticated Nat Cole/Charles Brown club style. I've sometimes had my doubts though, especially as to whether he wrote everything his name's on. Wonder how the film handles him, or if it omits him altogether.

Noonan's most telling observation is that she thinks 2005 was the height of prosperity. Taking a GNP (Gross National Profit) and averaging it by population does not determine the financial health of a country, only Noonan's friends.

"America is a "center-right nation" that elected Barack Obama to crush his fellow "socialist" hippies, discard the agenda he campaigned on, and meet the policy demands of electorally humiliated Republicans."

That's strange, Joe Conason's saying a version of that very thing down the row, and he seems to have no trouble with it. Funny what a little success can do, I guess. Like many other posters, I share reservations over Obama's appointments so far. I want to see the full slate and the new government's direction before judging, but fear it won't be different enough from the Clinton debacle.

Obama has always acted and voted as a centrist; his reputation as anything else is owed mostly to his exotic background and the erroneous National Journal rating. It's time for true progressives to face it: we've made real strides, but this was the best we could do for a candidate, and we've elected him. It's time to unite behind groups like Democracy For America and MoveOn to push the agenda to the new government, in terms of pragmatism and morality. The battle is never over. Thanks for this column.