Why the glee in seeing Roger squirm? I know a lot of people hate him, but these show hearings smack of the same self-righteousness that permeated much of the GOP smear machine of the last decade, culminating in the perjury show trial of Bill Clinton. Sure Clemens is presumed guilty. And like countless others who've made serious professional misjudgments, he lied about what he did wrong.

But this, like the rest of the Mitchell Report gets us absolutely nowhere. It's ultimately little more than a list of names with no plan for where to go or pathway leading baseball out of the doping era. Like most government documents, it's long on the facts and short on the vision. As such, slamming Clemens to the wall for contradicting it is of little or no use since it could be played out ad infinitum throughout modern baseball, with some players being honest, and many more with fading memories and increasing contradictions.

Throw Clemens in jail -- what do I care? But what does it say about Democrats that this is the best they can come up with? After all we did to give them back both houses of Congress, this is what we get. We still have a war. Telecoms get immunity for crimes against the American people. And Roger Clemens is nailed for lying about getting a needle stuck in his butt. Somewhere a democracy is dying.

You must not have been alive very long. DAT was a next-gen format that never caught on beyond deadheads and people who do field recordings. Mini-Disc was next-gen attempt at shrinking the CD. HDCD is a more-or-less failed next-gen format. ADVD is a great format that has mostly been used to re-master old albums into 5.1 surround sound. But it's applications probably don't go very far. Hell, those are just the ones I can think of in two minutes.

If your knowledge of failed next-gen formats ends with 8-Track, you pretty much haven't listened to music or watched a movie since 1978.

from this day forth, that all politicians must stop their speeches at point of reference and attribute all borrowed words and phrases to the person who originally spake them (including date and or page number), and by holding their arms aloft move each hand's index and middle fingers up and down and say "quote" when the word or phrase begins and "endquote" when the word or phrase ends, thus heralding a new age in attribution in spoken political discourse.

"I'd rather be MC Hammer than Nine Inch Nails." Reznor spent the last month bitching about how badly the Saul Williams experiment went. Now he goes and does it with his band's album? More power to him, but Radiohead could afford to do this since they actually sell albums. NIN hasn't been relevant, much less successful, since the mid-nineties. Unless American music tastes slide back a decade or more pretty quickly, I think a more copies of this will be stolen than paid for.

who can you trust?

Exactly why I look forward to your column, Mr. Smith. Thanks!

As a child of the 70s, thank goodness I won't be around in a hundred years to read about the issues on which this election was "decided." It doesn't make any sense, even living through it like we are.

to make ShawnWM shut the hell up? It's like watching a monkey masturbate, only more disturbing.

After retaking the house and senate, democrats have been ineffective at building bi-partisan consensus on any issue. And they have failed at circumventing anything on the Bush agenda like a good opposition might want to do. Even if they claimed temporary victories on various pieces of legislation, they have basically given Bush everything he wanted: endless war, spiraling national debt, a worthless dollar. No matter how good Obama might be in six months, he can't save us from the last eight years of unopposed GOP agenda.

If we only had a dollar for every writer who's said their idea is wholly original. That they don't watch television or read the work of their peers. That in the age of the Internet, they were not in any way exposed to the genres in which they write. I'm not sure what a 34 year-old writer (who would've been about 24 when Buffy first appeared on the WB) expects that we have been smoking.

But no one really believes Ms. Meyer (and by extension Ms. Hardwicke) has not been exposed to rich literary culture behind horror and vampires. The mythology surrounding vampires is pretty specific in many regards (drinking blood to live, aversion to sunlight, etc.). How does Ms. Meyer even know what a vampire is? Did she look it up on Wikipedia (err, the dictionary)? Or did she invent them herself?

Gluing the locks on a women's clinic is not vandalism. Nor does even resemble the honorable tradition of non-violent protest. Its part of a broad pattern of intimidation of doctors and patients practiced by the "pro life" movement. I personally think that if national pundits like Bill O'Reilly (in transcripts now conveniently scrubbed from the Fox News web site) were not allowed to brand a doctor performing a legal procedure "Tiller the Killer" then perhaps we'd see the "pro life" movement for what it really is: fringe and dangerous.