It was clear to everyone listening to the press conference that the press had caught him bald-face in a lie and, no matter how much one dislikes the man, it was almost painful to watch him wriggle around there like a bug on a pin.

The real question is, so why wasn't this major news the next day? Pity? A gesture of "forgiveness" or "bipartisanship" following the man's (and his party's) slapdown by the voters? My guess is that the mainstream media didn't want to look partisan to the Democrats.

Yet they had a fundamental duty to do so here because the basic news item is that the president lied (for pretty clear political reasons) and admitted he lied. The media has a responsibility to say so, because this is not a trivial point. It certainly did so in excruciating detail with Clinton. Or, to be more contemporary, imagine that it was John Kerry who had been caught lying to reporters... good grief, we just had a three-day news cycle devoted to willfully repeating a mis-interpretation of a badly told joke. And if Howard Dean had so much as sneezed too loudly in public, we would have had focus there too.

I'm not saying that the major media (outside of Fox, of course) has a right-wing bias. I'm saying that they have been so thoroughly damaged by the right's accusations of their left-wing bias that they cannot really do their jobs any more. Why send reporters to a press conference and allow them to ask hard questions when you don't cover the event after the fact. Shame, shame.

I want to thank you for this excellent, funny and really insightful piece. I was arguing the opposite tact this morning in discussing with my spouse how to deal with our normal, difficult teenagers this morning and this made me realize once again that parenting is not as simple as I pompously assume it is. I don't think real abuse is OK, but kids, particularly teenagers naturally ASSUME that there will be parental resistance to the revolution that they want to bring about (this makes me think about what made "Malcolm in the Middle" so funny) and to not provide it is really to upset the balance of power and of nature itself. If you love your kids, you can occasionally lose your temper and say something angry/mean back. What they take away is not that you suddenly don't love them but that they have crossed a line that shouldn't be crossed.

Regarding Shaw's distinction between "barbarous and civilized behaviour" and this research, we need to consider the fact that we've essentially been doing this kind of manipulation since we BECAME civilized. The basis of human civilization is agriculture and the basis of agriculture has been the manipulation of the genetic stock of other species, from yeast to barley to cows to dogs, in order to make them useful to us, not to make them happy or viable in the wild, or even healthy -- albeit that the methods we used were considerably less sophisticated than the ones used here. Regardless, they were no more natural and the products have been fairly monstrous, though we prefer not to think about it.

Consider brocolli, cauliflower, cabbage and kale -- all derived from the same species by using (extremely unnatural) breeding techniques. Consider purebred dogs, which are inbred generation after generation to get the qualities we desire -- the sweet temper of a golden retreiver, for example. Nevermind the hip dysplasia problems, the tendency to develop tumors, the allergy problems. Consider every breed we eat for meat -- all pretty much unrecognizable when compared to the wild stock we created them from less than 10,000 years ago (most much more recently).

OK, there is a "yuck factor" here in looking at a new and unfamiliar genetic technology, but we have been developing genetic technologies all a long and this is just one that is new and strange to us. Perhaps it IS dangerous -- sometimes new technologies are, and we learn that and they need to be discarded. So far, there is no strong evidence to that affect, but we do need to be careful. But to object to this on moral grounds is either disingenuous or naive, unless you are also prepared to cast off the trappings of a large part of the knowledge and work that has allowed our species to survive and thrive.

I'm supposed to be shocked by the disappearance of the movie critic when that has been preceeded by the disappearance of the book reviewer, the art reviewer, the theater reviewer, the music critic, the science reporter, the international correspondent, the washington reporter, the business reporter, the features writer, etc.,etc.? First they came for the afternoon dailies, ("and I said nothing...") then they came for the regional papers, then they came for network news... and finally, the movies! Then all that was left was reality TV, blogs and the yawning, static-y silence of American culture... which I guess suits many out in the audience just fine.

I just want to concur with other comments that there really needs to be a lot more of this kind of excellent, thoroughly sourced, scientifically complex environmental reporting. The larger issue here has huge consequences both for us and for the environment, and clear reporting like this that doesn't oversimplify the potential causes is a real public service.

The real question here is how did we get so close to the abyss that we let a group of such astounding numbnuts get significant national power and almost put someone this dumb a heartbeat from the presidency of the most powerful nation on earth? Her main qualification seems to have been that she, like them, was raised by racoons. You have to worry a bit about how all this looks to the outside world. It used to be that you kept the brain-damaged relatives locked in the back bedroom so the neighbors wouldn't see them.