Survivor: Micronesia was crap, as were all the other previous seasons. House, on the other hand, is magnificent. It is set in New Jersey, you know, not Seattle.

Kudos to Rachel Shukert for skewering the reading list on "How to Be a Man." The very idea of manliness is absurd. The mere fact that the list overlaps with my 11th grade curriculum is a barometer of the shallowness of this notion. I too was appalled that there were books extolling political philosophies of hundreds of years (let alone thousands of years) vintage. Just three women authors? No Jewish authors? No black authors? Appalling. This list sucks.

Grey's Anatomy: set in Seattle. House: set in Princeton.

Isn't she just cute as a button?

yay!

I hate

posts that rhyme.

They grate

and should be a crime.

Year after year after year, every critic in every newspaper beats up on the Oscars, thereby demonstrating his or her superiority and highly refined sense of aesthetics. It's getting old. Write something original.

Yes, it is utterly despicable that the press is heralding this Sully whatever his name is for heroism. Just do your job, shut the hell up, and stop preempting my favorite TV shows (House, American Idol, Fringe, Bones, Kitchen Nightmares, Cops, Lie to Me, etc).

Somebody said something stupid on cable tv. Big whoop.

Please don't feed the trolls.

What a strange, fact-free rant. Kind of like Rush Limbaugh, from whom Paglia confesses to have learned so much.

Why are there never any Editor's Picks among the Paglia letters? Is it because Paglia never gets edited? I would have spiked the last 3 or 4 articles penned by this moron.

I see that Salon has finally decided to compete mano-a-mano with Drudge Report.

I don’t think Salon readers need to have conservatives explained to them by Wingnut. Actually, it’s the other way around. Wingnut needs to understand why Salon readers think that “George W. Bush broke America,” then address these concerns. I won’t pretend to speak for all Salon readers, but here are my concerns: (1) The response to Katrina was less than competent (“heck of a job Brownie”). (2) The politically-motivated dismissals of the attorneys general by the hacks in the Justice department made me doubt that equal protection under the law was operative during the Bush years (see Rove, Gonzales). (3) Attacking Iraq after 9/11 because there were more targets there than in Afghanistan (Rumsfield), making the case for that attack by trumping bogus intelligence (Atta in Iraq, Nigerian yellowcake, aluminum tubes, mushroom clouds) and attacking dissenters (Joe Wilson) was not honorable. (4) Declaring the Geneva Conventions to be quaint (Gonzales), Justice Department lawyers redefining torture out of existence (Bybee), and dismissing the abuses at Abu Graib Prison (Rumsfield) was not honorable. There are other examples, but Wingnut could start by addressing these. In Wingnut’s memorable words, I hope this helps.

I see the wingnuts are out in force today.

... and I'm having some bad thoughts right now ...

Wingnut's articles seem to be written with a boiler plate. The first paragraph always makes a sarcastic reference to all the "interesting" commentary his previous offering has inspired. Then he describes as laughable the question he's been tasked to answer, and instead of answering it tries to bamboozle us with the usual Bush Administration talking points. I get flashbacks to press briefings on Iraq. (Question: given that on average 100 headless corpses are found on the streets of Baghdad every morning, does the President feel that he is making progress tamping down the insurgency? Answer: we our proud of the 101 new Biffys we've installed in the Green Zone.) There is the usual blame-shifting to distorted liberal media accounts of the G.O.P., as if Fox News does not exist to cheer on the Republicans' every move. There are always the one or two especially snarky put-downs of the opposing team (there are two of them in the present article: the alternative to Star Wars is the "throw up our hands because there is nothing we can do" approach, and a reference to global warming "extremists"). And there's there's the trademark fuck you "I hope that helps" sign-off. What frustrates me is that all the interesting commentary on the issues the Wingnut was hired to address appears in the letters section, and one has to wade through the flame wars (agore vs ktrout) to get to the dozen or so really good ones among the 250 or so spread out over 37 or so pages. So my humble suggestion is this: after this series has ended, why not have Sidney Blumenthal or some other respected, capable, talented, rational, liberal author summarize the Wingnut's non-replies and the Salon readers' rebuttals and really pound this anonymous Bush Legacy Burnisher into the ground the way Wanda Sykes spanked Rush Limbaugh recently?

Camille Paglia reminds me of the steamroom lady my girlfriend encountered at the JCC recently. She went on and on about her swine flu conspiracy theory and other random disjointed topics of interest only to her, and her steamroom neighbors could only listen in rapt perplexed attention. Paglia loves conservative talk radio. But she thinks Rush Limbaugh's guest host went overboard taling about killing Pelosi. Robert Gibbs should be fired for shrugging off questions about the NYC photo-op fly-by, and Obama, who might be a closet socialist (that remains to be seen), seems uncertain of his constitutional duties as commander in chief. Something about hip gay movie culture. Something about Madanna's veiny arms. Something about Paglia's militant manifesto. I say we just put Paglia and Wingnut in the same room and tape them conversing for five hours and play the tape back to enemy combatants instead of waterboarding them.

Proof enough that this is a worthwhile series!

Fufu fighter flip-flops to front, terrorizes Taliban.

Heather deserves an honorary Ph.D. in Crapology.

Perhaps Cheney isn't really hoping for a new attack to prove him right, but he sure does seem to get off on openly fantasizing about it over and over and over again.