I recently wrote a post on my barackobama.com blog: http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/1337/gGCjLT

I am completely incensed by this elitist issue. I sure hope a presidential candidate has a Harvard Degree or equivalent. When a president has to negotiate a trade deal, or faces some kind of international crisis, I hope he has done the intellectual work beforehand to deal with it effectively (and we've seen the consequences of this deficit in our current commander-in-chief). In accordance with a Harvard degree goes a certain kind of lifestyle, of course. I think we're all familiar with the type: shops at Whole Foods, buys designer clothes, Liberal, intellectual, etc. I mean what epoch do we live in. It's a globalized,24/7 world where a large corporation won't even interview an executive unless they speak multiple languages and has at least a master's degree. I mean who are you going to vote for president: Henry McDougal, president of the Coal Miner's Union Local 127 in Blacksburg VA? Nothing on union guys or Appalachian folk, but it's a different world out there. It's not 1921 anymore.

Why should anyone have to apologize for that, especially someone with Barack Obama's background. As if George Stephanopoulos, or Maureen Dowd, shop at Wal-Mart.

But there's a certain, albeit small, segment of the American populace that has no love for secular intellectualism. They disdain the so-called "Limousine Liberals", and Hollywood et. al. So they go with the Republican who they feel they can have a beer with. Who disingenuously sides with their anti-intellectualism while he sends his own kids to Yale. Who stokes the flame of their fears by saying these liberals want to take their guns and their God away. "Why they're all brie-eatin' organic-buyin' hippies who want to raise your taxes." While he sells them all out once he gets into office, for his true benefactors: very rich people and the corporatinists who are all corporationy ;)

The Annie Leibovitz picture is indeed artistic and classy, if simply so. However, there's a kind of post-coital exhaustion that is meant to be represented in that shot (the tussled hair, the satin sheet over the naked body, the firetruck-red lipstick) that had a man taken Ms. Hepola would have been crying child rape.

As to her other photos, they certainly don't look like they were taken with a cellphone, however they look like every other teenage girl's photos of her and her boyfriend. certainly there is a staid immaturity to them that makes them easily dismissable as any other LOL! OMG!!! photos taken by any other teenage girl in America.

But with Leibovitz's shot there is an intent at representing the subject in a salacious light, almost as a 19th century Parisian prostitute not entirely outside of an Edouard Manet painting. That the parent of a young girl would feel uncomfortable by it is not so easily dismissed.

FYI I am not the parent of a young girl, so am not so outraged by it, but I could see where they're coming from.

Woulda could shoulda is her campaign theme of the moment. If ifs and buts were candy and nuts we'd all have a merry primary.

Why can't she just accept the fact the she lost. She was campaigning like it was 1998 and not 2008 with all the success it entailed.

No doubt there is some kind of movie tie-in involved.

1) There is no such company as AIrobotics.

If there was its stock would be worth more than google.

2) It is obvious that these 'robots.txt' are real-live actors.

Notice that their eyes aren't fixed like a doll, but move in tics like a human's.

3) Thanks reactionary feminists for falling for a viral marketing campaign.

Free publicity brought to you by salon.com

But their sex drive has made them into the Cosmo-reading Man chasing fashionistas they are today.

I can't imagine that Mrs. Flory would think the above comment sexist. After all, feminism is about equality and mutual respect, isn't it?

While true that Hillary was called names, she never in her life had to contend with being a black person. I'm sure that in her magical childhood in Scranton PA, she heard more the a few 'N-words' uttered. Abd as to Teresa Heinz-Kerry, while she is white, she is also European and speaks English with a slight accent. I thinks that's where America had the problem.

Furthermore, believe it or not, yuppies, hipsters, et. al., there are millions of Americans (your Iowans, Minnesotans, Kansans, etc) whose only contact with a black person on a day-to-day basis is Oprah. Unconsciously, to them, black people exist as some kind of mythical creature, like unicorns:) To them black people exist in some far-away urban ghetto stealing their tax dollars for welfare.

So for them to be confronted with a successful black woman who isn't Oprah, and who may be first lady and who didn't have the typical princess-like childhood of a white girl of privilege, would come as a shock. It would surprise them to know that Michelle Obama didn't live a lily-white Mayberry childhood where all was peaches and cream. I assume that from a very early age she was told to be wary of white people, especially at that time.

Because the one thing about Americans is that they do not want to be dissuaded from the closely held view that the US is the greatest country on earth; anybody who says different is just an NAACP agitator who wants to cause trouble, you know, like Rosa Parks.

Believe it or not, salon readers, most of America does not live on Sesame Street, as some of you like to think you do.

I think porn does not legally count as prostitution because it's protected by the first amendment. While true there is money and sex involved, usually both parties are compensated, and there is no soliciting involved--in other words no one is trolling the streets looking for a porn actress.