I want to hear what Kucinich has to say but I never watch these debates because they eat up so much time and are in a format that demands posturing and pontification that gets so old after a while. I wish someone could refer me to a site where these debates are summarized in as much detail as fairness and intelligence require. That means Joe Biden gets a sentence or two and some of the others get a page, depending on the topic.

The reference in this report to the John Birchers is very appropriate. I've been saying for years that the dominance of the extreme right wing of the Republican Party was the dream of the old John Birch Society come true. Corsi is just one of many who trace their ideological lineage to that formerly comical organization, which called Dwight Eisenhower a "conscious agent of the communist conspiracy." Today it's sovereignty, but it's all the same, really -- it's about the domination of the world by the U.S. and consigning to the ash heap such quaint and naive groups as our entire diplomatic service. What a bunch of wimps. They actually COMPROMISE sometimes. Birchers don't compromise, they give ultimatums, with negative replies responded to with nukes. That's why Cheney was all set to nuke Iran months ago, and why Bush won't authorize any serious negotiations with them.

In short, our country is being led by comically crazy people. Let's hope they leave office before some really serious things happen.

The advice of not letting the match hit this dynamite is correct, but all the more because Tennis is wrong is supposing the kid is not as turned on as his stepmom. Has he never heard of MILFs? "Mothers I'd Like to F***"? Who do you think invented that phrase, mothers? No, dude, it was horny young studs like this "tall, dark and handsome" kid for whom Mrs. Robinson is one of the classic hotties of all time. Authority figure, role model, baloney. Hormones say, "BABE ALERT; PREPARE FOR SEX; SCHWIINNGGG!"

The dangerous thing here is that, since they have been a family since the kid was nine, there may be incestuous overtones, at least for him. There are psychological operators, I think genetic, which tend to make otherwise attractive persons in close proximity to one during early formative years sexually taboo. The classic study showed that people raised in the same Israeli kibbutz, sleeping every night in the same dormitory, never married, ever. Psychologically they had become siblings. That may be a factor here, in which case if the kid is attracted, it's especially hairy. If not, if he was past that influence by age nine, then it's just a standard mess.

I think the lady needs to work out an understanding with her husband to see other men, or get some really good sex toys, or, if it will ice the stepson issue, cheat. She's obviously alive sexually and deserves to have that part of her humanity acknowledged. If her husband can't give her her propers, she should quietly insist on some other arrangement. Just one that doesn't include the kid.

First, we need to publicly acknowledge that we have done some wrong things, such as subverting Iran's democracy in 1953 to control its oil. Second, we should renounce war as an instrument of foreign policy. Third, in fighting terrorism, we should devote as much energy to persuasion as we do to interdiction. Finally, we should strive once again to be a good neighbor in the world, and a role model for justice and compassion and democracy.

There are a great many people out here in the America outside Manhattan and the Beltway who just read the papers and figure things out. We have known for YEARS that the real agenda was to occupy the Middle East in perpetuity. And in case you missed it, THE BUSHIES SAID SO. The famous PNAC White Paper delivered by Wolfowitz, Feith and Perle to Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996 said as much, and you wouldn't have to be a fly on that wall to figure out that protection of Israel was a big part of the long-term plan -- or rather, protection of Likud's Israel. And right behind that was the Greater Middle East Initiative, which happily programmed the whole future of the Middle East through American eyes.

All this was impossible without a permanent miltary base in Iraq, propping up democracy of a kind we approved at the point of a gun. It's why the Bushies have always hated timetables for withdrawal. It's why, to this day, the Bushies insist on characterizing all the issues in Iraq as being about the military operation, which we must "win", even though 80% of Iraqis want us to leave, the rest being Kurds.

I don't really care if the big-time journalists, including Salon, figure out what's happening over there, the rest of us have a bead on it and we've already changed the majority party in Congress. Next year we're going to elect an anti-war president and fire a bunch more Congressmen and Senators who keep bleating the neocon line. American democracy is alive and well, and that's going to fix everything else.

About 500 years from now, when the concept of sexual sharing is widely accepted as the only logical model for human beings, who, science tells us, are by nature sexually non-monogamous at the same time they tend toward committed relationships, an article like this will be seen as pathetic and peculiar. Meanwhile, a good deal of sex-hating religious doctrine will have to be modified. And good riddance. Such doctrine has been used to justify slavery, war, torture, oppression of women and child-beating, and it's no more right to repress natural sexual needs than any of those horrors. Sex is joyful. Channel it into a shared model of reaching out to common friends and all will be well.