Right now I've been playing Red Hot Chili Peppers ("Mother's Milk") and Orange Range ("Musiq") every workout. Orange Range is a little like a Japanese Chili Peppers -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_Range , but with more techno (yes..) and pop.

The humor and tempo of both keep me going, with just enough soul and emotion but not enough to be distracting when I'm a dripping, drooling mess on the leg machine.

Well, I don't really like RHCP's new stuff, either... even though they've become massively more successful. "Dani California" being so popular kind of escapes me.. must be a commentary on how bad (pop) music is these days..

Ann Coulter is a scary sight... we need to get her spindly, bony ass to a gym. She's like the anorexic girls who always badmouthed the normal, healthy looking girls as "fat".

She just radiates prep school, "I summer in the Hahmptons" dweeby privilege. I couldn't believe it when I saw her on TV.

A passage I clipped from a Table Talk post a few years back, by a member named WF Burton -

--

Myth: Al Gore claimed to have Invented the Internet.

Fact: Al Gore never made that claim. His actual words were "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." Because he held the hearings and wrote and sponsored the legislation which expanded the Internet from the Arpanet of the 70's into the Internet of today, he was taking the credit (in much the same way a politician takes credit for Building a Road or Building an Airport without doing any of the physical labor himself).

Don't take my word for it, take that of Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf (the acknowledged Fathers of the Internet):

The fact of the matter is that Gore was talking about and promoting the Internet long before most people were listening. We feel it is timely to offer our perspective. As far back as the 1970s Congressman Gore promoted the idea of high speed telecommunications as an engine for both economic growth and the improvement of our educational system. He was the first elected official to grasp the potential of computer communications to have a broader impact than just improving the conduct of science and scholarship.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/13640.html

http://commons.somewhere.com/rre/2000/RRE.campaign.lunacy.html

http://chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/zorn/0,1122,SAV-0008220064,00.html

While the Vice President may have chosen his words poorly, he was instrumental in the creation of the Internet.

I actually was going to post an attempt at some of the same points you made, before I saw yours. Gore certainly was savvy in succeeding to make "global warming" as mainstream as possible; as someone said earlier (in this thread, I believe), he built on his "Inconvenient Truth" movie which in turn built on his lectures (which, I guess, built on his 1992 book). Every bit helps in keeping the right from dismissing him as fringe, and in turn, from dismissing the problem of global warming as fringe.

And, in turn, the more mainstream the issue is with the public, the more politically unavoidable it will become for the pols to take effective action.

Although, I suspect it isn't liberals that have been disingenuously picking at the supposed lack of efficacy of Live Earth, but conservative (pro-business) trolls...

Wonder what's behind that..

or are a majority of those journalism majors still too passive and still too used to being spoonfed talking points from the administration?

Ridiculous couch-potato chickenhawks..

It seems it'd be an extremely easy sell to the general public (the commonsense aspect of it certainly seems more cogent than the arguments about small states retaining their disproportionate clout, etc).

If we can get this to the level of popular culture and conventional wisdom, such that the naysayers are fighting a losing battle -- as seems to be the case with environmentalism this past year or so (Live Earth, popular media, Bush forced to at least appear to be environmentally friendly) -- then the lawmakers might be forced to vote for it.

(Eventually?)

@Kerianfree - As to education level correlating with Obama more than Hillary, you also have to think about how that could play out in the general election. Candidates that play well with the regular people have done better than those that appealed to the educated primary voters -- compare Gary Hart, Howard Dean, & to some extent Kerry, who lost, with Bill Clinton, George W., etc.

@no one in particular - the thing about negatives is that we don't know how the GOP will drive up the negatives of Obama once they try. It's one of Hillary's arguments, but to me it holds water: she's already been "vetted" and people already know everything they will about her. Once the GOP'ers start hammering on Obama's inexperience (imagine how green he could look going up against Giuliani -- at least, that is if he's not careful), or that "Hussein" thing, or his supposed Islamic ties, or even reviving their "southern strategy" to incite latent racism among swing voters, or to bring out their base.. who knows what his negative numbers will look like.

We don't really know which attacks on our candidates will stick and which won't, yet (to me, Obama's inexperience might be his real weak point with the general public, with the other B.S. being relatively minor), but a key thing is how they respond -- in this area we need the farthest thing from Kerry and his whole mealy-mouthed tone deafness. Hillary does give us that, with the experience and toughness of her team; Obama's team thus far has been pretty good in the rapid response department, but like many things with Obama, we don't really know yet..

With those remarks about the Rutgers women's basketball team. There's something about these blowhard middle-aged conservative guys.