I don't understand why Obama supporters (and this goes for the controversy around Paul Krugman's column in the Times as well) treat every negative comment about him as some kind of catastrophe - as if, We've GOT to elect this man, why are you getting in the way? I've been leaning toward Edwards, and if there's any dirt surrounding him worse than the haircut, I want to know about it now, rather than wait until just before the general election. Conason's point is interesting, and hardly fatal: if my support for Obama was 48% yesterday, maybe it's 47.5% today. If Obama wins the primaries, I will happily vote for him against whatever sleazebag the Repugs are reduced to. I only wish Richardson, Kucinich, and Dodd could get covered in as much detail, both positive and negative.

The dirt on Edwards is his life-long association with the worst of all special intersts- THE AIPAC LOBBY.

Thanks. You don't exactly support your statements, but I did some digging around on the internet, and I agree that Edwards' views on the subject are not what I would have hoped. Unlike Obama's supporters, I want to know what the negatives are, nor will I accuse anyone who brings them up of being a secret shill for some other candidate. Whatever happens, I'm sure, when I walk into the voting booth, that I will pull the lever for a candidate whose shortcomings I will readily admit.

That I will not be able, as I had long planned, to vote for John Edwards this time around saddens me. I hope the chance will come 'round again, and that next time the media (including Salon, who surprised and disappointed me in this respect) will be forced to give him a fair deal.

That's really funny in a very sad way, or really sad in a very funny way. Bolling's great.

That's me. I would be thrilled to see a woman president or an African-American president, but Kucinich fit my values most closely, Dodd heroically threatened to filibuster FISA, and Edwards was the populist I'd hoped to see again in my lifetime. If either Hillary or Obama would stand up against FISA, or promise to fight the corporations, I'd leap into their camp. But they've both been so timid, so middle-of-the-road. And for the first time in my voting life, I'm going to skip the primary, because I really don't give a crap which of them gets it. I just hope to god the rest of the country will choose the one who can beat McCain.

I did a little double-take seeing your headline about the Giants and the Patriots and then, just below it, an offer for Glenn Greenwald's "How Would a Patriot Act?" For a split second I thought Glenn was getting into sports coverage.

Along with Salon's Glenn Greenwald, Paul Krugman is the fairest, smartest, and most objective voice in the media today. I read his every column and his blog, and I see exactly where he's coming from. He started out detailing a factual problem with Obama's health care plan - which, as an economist, is his particular bailiwick, and thanks to him for keeping track of these things for us - and was flooded with vitriolic responses from Obama supporters who refused to allow any attribution of imperfection to their candidate. I've observed the same phenomenon many times in Salon, and have commented on it: anyone who pinpoints the tiniest chink in Obama's armor gets abundantly derided as a secret Hillary shill. (Neither Obama nor Hillary was in my top three choices.) I really haven't noticed any such flow in the opposite direction.

If Obama's the candidate, I'll vote for him wholeheartedly in the general. But I'm not going to pretend he's perfect, nor that any of the candidates are perfect. Every politician has overpowering incentives to lie, spin, or censor the truth from time to time, and we do the best we can with them. But thank the gods we have people like Krugman and Greenwald who remain vigilant, objective, and unafraid to tell the truth as they see it. I admire them more than any politician alive.

"Rebecca Traister responds to Fonda's use of the controversial word."

But she didn't really respond, just told me basically what I had already heard, and told me what that idiot Bill O'Reilly responded - as if I cared. Ms. Traister, what is your opinion?

Please don't suck me into reading an article by promising something you don't deliver - that's standard procedure at Slate, which is why I read Slate about a 1/50th as often as I read Salon.

To understand jazz, especially advanced jazz, from the inside, you have to simultaneously follow every note of a solo and relate it to the melodic and harmonic background -- but that can start to feel strenuous, non-sensuous, almost mathematical.

As a classical musician who plans to do jazz in his next life, I was saddened that anyone would even partially have this reaction to jazz, as people often do to new "classical" music as well. You only need to "understand" the music "from the inside" if it's your job to play it - and sometimes not even then. Many people intimidate themselves out of great artistic experiences by imagining that they need to understand how it works.

Thanks for the link, that's an interesting Buckley/Chomsky debate. But, gentlemanly as Buckley's manner was, I got pretty frustrated waiting for him to shut up and let Chomsky finish a sentence.