It seems to me that the Second Amendment was written in a time when in fact homesteaders had to rely on their wits to survive and the possibility of needing to rise up against armed insurgents was an actual reality. Us city dwellers of today fed off Hollywood popcorn bravura seem to think that a Rambo-style stand-off against our own armed forces, if it came to that, would be both welcomed and victorious. Who are we kidding?! This notion of the homeowner standing at the doorway of his/her own home brandishing an AK 47 and fending off the invading hordes is ludicrous. This is a nice fiction perpetrated by the self-same bunch of nitwits who constantly warn us of our "feminization" and decry today's youth as lacking sufficient "survival instinct". Does it make these people feel more potent as individuals if they envision barbarous thugs around every corner? Somehow me thinks a public armed to the teeth and ready for action will not prevent wanton individuals fed on the same fantasies from falling through the cracks and ending up on TV in their bid for their 15 minutes. I think it's time that we looked at those troublesome neighbors down the street as fellow citizens rather than possible threats to our security. I wonder how many of these gun owners who like to keep a piece loaded and ready under their bed or under their pillow or locked in a cabinet in the den, have ever needed to take the little guy out and save his family from a rapist, thug or burglar intent on disrupting their contented domicile and making off with their widescreen TV. I would love to see statistics on that.

The copy of Sgt Pepper I own is the english version (with the weird-ass bit of sound collage that repeats into the end groove). It sits on a shelf in a pristine plastic sleeve and has not seen a turntable since the 80's when I owned one. It is an artifact and something for which I have warm nostalgia for as it represents a kind of culmination and synthesis of so much that was joyous and exciting from that particular era. It embodies so much of the sense of discovery and wonder of that time minus the cops and the riots and the Vietnam War and junkies and the Black Panthers. It's not the most original nor the edgiest thing produced during that time period. It's not actually even the most influential. They weren't Jimi Hendrix and they weren't The Doors. In some ways it represents the end of that era wrapped up in a pretty package with a bit of actual poetry thrown in for good measure. I never listen to it , but then I don't have to as it's pobably part of my DNA. That's not necessarily a good thing because so is "Maxwell's Silver Hammer".

Increasingly it becomes clear that the only way to understand how the Bush administration operates is to dig beneath the presentation of "news" and how it ends up providing a framework which eventually becomes "the accepted consensus" which in turn gets regurgitated ad nauseum throught the mainstream outlets. Insidious and perverse in the extreme. The notions that were put forth for the initial invasion were created the same way with The Times again playing a key role. The approach is similar: Send in a well-paid hack. Tell them what to say. Write a "non-partisan" op-ed. Have administration officials casually "refer" to these pieces of "journalism" as somehow "objective" and dissacciated from the administration.

Thanks Glenn. You give me hope that digging beneath the surface and refusing the "official" line could help us wrest control again of this narrative nightmare that we find ourselves living in. I'm beginning to think that things could get a helluva lot worse if we don't start pushing back.

I am amazed that some of these people can look themselves in the mirror in the morning and not whither at the thought of their abject complicity in fomenting these fake stories in order to gin up all the ersatz outrage that they seem to need in order to energize their shriveling, fragmenting base. Stand tall, Glenn. These people know no shame.

The one thing that has kept me from jumping full-force onto the Obama bandwagon has been the egregious amount of contempt hurled at Hillary, most of it born of nothing more than unexamined prejudice against the Clintons but much of it seems to come from a serious double standard regarding female politicians in general. Face it, there may have been missteps here and there, but Hillary is damned no matter what she does and her every utterance, facial tic, mannerism is looked at through a microscopic lens not used on either of the male candidates. For all the self-congratulatory buzz surrounding Obama's candidacy , there still seems to me to be a reluctance to seriously consider the possibility of a woman president. Since when where considerations about a male candidate's personality, pantsuits and thick ankles fodder for discussions about credibility? (Yes, things at times do sink to THAT level.) Personality isn't the actual issue either because McCain has all the personal warmth of a porcupine. At this moment in time it really seems to me that it would be a bigger evolutionary step as a country for us to elect a woman president than a male of african-american descent no matter how appealing.