I grew up with Perry, Della, and Paul in the 1950s and early 1960s. With Lieutenant Tragg and Hamilton Burger, they formed a sort of surrogate family for someone who longed to get out of the suburbs and see what "real life" was all about. I think you're right that there was something subversive about Perry's loyalty to his clients. He always judged their guilt or innocence within minutes of meeting them and stuck by them to the end. The evidence might say guilty, but his gut declared otherwise. And yes, I think my generation took this sense of justice into our daily lives and, after the "unsolved" murder of a president, we challenged our elders to do the right thing--in civil rights, in Vietnam, etc. I'm certainly not crediting Perry with inspiring the counter-culture here (he seemed particularly down on the beat culture in a couple of episodes), but he played his part. As Mojo Nixon might say, "I'm not talking 'bout no Ironsides." We never did learn much about Perry's private life. He lived alone and never dated. Della, too, kept her private life private, apart from a sisterly flirtation with Paul. She played Perry's beard on a number of occasions and was always gorgeous. Little did we know what skeletons might be lurking in Perry Mason or Raymond Burr's closet--and the interesting thing is, we didn't care!

I don't know what everybody's so upset about. If Obama showed up for church as often as he showed up for votes in the Senate, that means he barely registered as a parishioner in Wright's church at all. Ergo, he can't be held responsible for Wright's rants.

Clinton is better out of the race. What an incredibly ugly electoral system we have in America. Your headline says it all: it's never enough to just win, first you have to bury your opponent, then pour gasoline on her, and then light a match. Politics is a variant form of indecent exposure: You sell your soul for votes to a bunch of backwater yokels in the primary states, then you gather dirt on your opponents while making campaign promises you know you can't keep, and then you denounce a friend of long-standing in a public forum, just to show the punters you'd bleed for them if necessary. It's ugly, and I think Hillary should get out while she still has a character left to salvage. It's too late for the other guy.

It's more understandable than being a sore winner.

Barack Obama may well turn out to be our first Black president. BO is many things; however, why does your headline writer insist upon calling him "young"? If he takes office at age 48, he will be just three years short of 51, which was my age when I had a heart attack. If he's "young," what do you call someone who's 18, 28, 38? Barack Obama is middle-aged; there is no getting around this. According to Webster's, mid-age starts at 45. And it's nothing to be ashamed about. So much has been made of Obama's inexperience, at a relatively "ripe" age, that you'd think his supporters would prefer to downplay the age factor. Not that youth is always a bad thing. There have been younger presidents in my own lifetime: John Kennedy, Bill Clinton. These "young" men were at least as competent as their eleders: Nixon, Reagan, Bush, etc. In your enthusiasm to hand Obama the keys to the White House, you don't seem to realize that the lily does not need gilding. Obama's accomplishments have already put him in the history books. Why are you trying to put him in a nursery?

"Yes, the right wing is obviously trying to paint Obama as a Muslim terrorist sympathizer -- it's the only card they have to play."

Au contraire, mon ami. The right wing always have their secret weapon, to be deployed whenever all else fails: the so-called "liberal press." Trust them to shoot themselves (and the liberal candidate) in the foot every time. As Janis Ian once said, "If your enemies don't get you, your friends will know how."

There goes the election. Obama's first big decision, and he blows it--big time. I'll still be voting for the idiot, but it's going to be McCain/Anybody in 2008.

Why has no one in the mainstream press reported on the history-making dive by out athlete Matthew Mitcham that took the gold in the closing hours of the Olympics? Why does the sight of Usain Bolt's chest-pounding make news, and not Mitcham's hug from his partner, Lachlan Fletcher? Does it, perhaps, not fit into the uber-macho script journalists have been typing about the Olympics, and athletes in general? Mitcham didn't chest pound or war-whoop, but his gentle victory should be an inspiration to us all.

Aren't our soldiers federal employees? How are they supposed to collect their benefits, by telling?

But Bruno is now synonymous with gay. The two words are forever linked. Be that on your head, Sacha Baron Cohen. Meanwhile, the man himself escapes behind a caricature--the fiction that is the driving force behind his "documentary." I have not seen the film, but I've seen clips, and I've seen Borat--Bruno will try his P.T. Barnum-best to get the mullets to humiliate themselves, and the mullets will do their best to indulge his (and the camera's) lunacy. Who do you think will come out smelling better?