here I am stuck with houseguests who are unable to sit in a room without me for more than 15 minutes. They follow me around like faithful collies. We ran out of conversation on Friday and they're here until Wednesday. I have had un-Christian thoughts about them

Unless this is fiction invented for the column, and there's nothing to indicate that it is, I hope your "guests" don't read Salon!

Not to put too fine a point on it, but have you ever looked up what "passive aggressive" means? One among many of the characteristics would include smiling and not saying anything to people you've invited into your home, then trashing them mercilessly (I'd say "like faithful collies" would definitely qualify) in print for all to see when they're not there to react or respond.

When one feels like writing a "Dear Prudence" style response to a column ("Dear Not At Home on the Prairie: Your guests clearly have no idea about your feeling put-out by them, naturally enough, since you invited them and then haven't done anything to indicate your displeasure. Consider just telling them in a courteous way that you need some time to yourself. By all means do not smile and mislead them and then turn and trash them in public. Yours, Prudie") or perhaps suggesting to the editors that they send this one on to what'shisname here who does the advice column locally, well, it's not a compliment, that's for certain.

Other than that, the issues of solitude are worth exploring. Oh and no, it's certainly not just something that men experience.

I clicked on this thinking it was going to be perhaps a long interesting examination and discussion of the notion of going offline, with perhaps input from people the writer interviewed who had gone off the grid, quotes from sociologists who had studied the issue, since surely some have, and so on.

Instead it ended up being basically the equivalent of an "I'm out of the office and will respond when I return next week" auto-reply, if one of those had a parenthetical ("I wonder how it will be to be offline?") tagged on serving as the thoughtful analysis part.

I've simply got to remember to make links on my home page to click directly to Tom Tomorrow and Glenn Greenwald, I keep forgetting.

Americans identify themselves as "conservative" in slightly higher percentages than "liberal" when given those choices. However, when asked about what they believe in, they show themselves to be what could only be called liberal or progressive in much higher percentages than conservative.

This has been documented many times and your examples were cherry-picked misleading nonsense. I could cite all of the studies and will link one good source to my signature here, but it's really not necessary because your own words make it clear:

The country, you write, "is not "liberal" in the Barack Obama/Nancy Pelosi sense of the word" .

Yet Barack Obama just won the election by a landslide.

So how does this work? Either Obama is not as liberal as you claim, or the country is.

Either way, as usual, your premise is basically defeated by your own words in the first few paragraphs.

What this amounts to is that the voters like the word "conservative" slightly more than the word "liberal", which has been demonized for years by the right and the media. (Yes, "the liberal media" is the big giveaway, since you hear it constantly, that's basically proof that it's anything but. Unless you think that it's the liberal media itself that's constantly calling itself that) yet the same voters are center-left in general, taken as a whole, meaning that the extreme right is averaged in too.

We don't need your theories or mine to see this, just look at the results. The Republicans became a fringe far right minority and lost all but the most fractional support, down to 20% now, and the only people who don't see that are those of you still furiously spinning.

Keep it up, as a Democrat I could only ask for your party to keep listening to you on the far right forever, it's a godsend for us.

When broadly polled, American do certainly espouse conservative values. This has always been the case with the country at large.

Utterly false. When Americans are broadly polled about labels and asked if they call themselves "liberal" or "conservative" they choose conservative in a somewhat higher percentage.

When polled on their values, they choose what can only be called liberal or progressive, in greater numbers than what could called conservative.

Case in point: right now 75% of Americans polled want a public health option.

Not only is that not even remotely a "conservative" position, on most news outlets you'd never even hear that it was true.

Here's a link to a good debunking of that particular right wing talking point, and one excerpt, the actual post contains links at all of these figures cited:

"The latest Pew Research poll showed that only 25 percent of the public agrees with the centerpiece of the conservative tax program: making Bush's tax cuts permanent. The public also agrees by 58 percent to 35 percent that the government should guarantee "health insurance for all citizens even if it means raising taxes."

Exit poll data showed that 60 percent of voters were worried about rising health care costs and that 66 percent of those people backed Obama.

A majority of Americans also want to expand environmental protections, increase the minimum wage, recognize same-sex marriage, and end the Iraq war, to name a few. "

http://pr.thinkprogress.org/2008/11/pr20081106/index.html