We all have our Charlie Browns. And our Lucy's and our Snoopy's and our Woodstocks and our Peppermint Patty's and our Schroeders. And our teachers saying nothing more than...wa wa wa wa wa wa wa.

The reason Peanuts was so universally adored is that it took all the human foibles that are so often perpetrated to make life miserable and turned them into gentle and benign stories that softened the hardness of real life.

Charles Schultz gave us all a wonderful gift. And the most offensive comment in this review is the one that implies his legacy was relevant to the 60's and 70's. Snoopy is as quietly pithy today as it was then. Maybe more so, because life today has taken on a much more jagged edge of incivility.

Whenever I sit down to write, I always think first....

"It was a dark and stormy night...."

Thanks for the memories, Charles Schultz.

And no thank you, Laura Miller for your mean and irrelevant assessment of this gifted man and your pandering to his mean and irrelevant biographer. The creative spirit comes from somewhere, and creative people are often criticized for their every human act and thought in an effort to bring their creativity down to a baser level. It is unnecessary and unwelcome.

I've always thought just the name "Blackwater" was about as sinister as you could get.

How did this macho caricature of every Ruby Ridge-style whacho's and psycho wannabe's wet dream manage to become a multi-national billion dollar company virtually overnight? Thank George Bush and the newly invented Wall Street phenom called Homeland Security. This is the new definition of a robust economy,folks.

Recently I braved a political discussion with one of my totally non-political friends. She is a secretary, her husband is a cop. She told me she doesn't vote, because she doesn't get involved in "stuff like that", as though it's only about politics and just too icky to take up space in her life.

She said her husband always votes Republican. I asked why, and she said "because that's what he is, that's the way his father raised him." Did it matter who the candidate was? Nope. He just knew he was a Republican, the way you are a Baptist or a Methodist, and by golly, that's the way he was supposed to vote.

I have had two kids on three tours in Iraq. I am deeply involved in the horrors that are unfolding in this country as a result of this administration. And my friends really care about me. And yet, they don't care about who is perpetrating this train wreck. They just know what they know.

And that is...you vote Republican, boy. That's how so many people can't name a GOP candidate, and yet will surely vote for one. The ballot will help...after all, it's a multiple choice question. And no matter which one they choose...what's the difference. They're all their daddies Republicans.

Do the math all you want. We're dealing with people who don't do math, or any other kind of thought process. And they watch Fox because it does their thinking for them.

Even though Clinton and Obama may or may not be completely committed to the remarks that seem to put them in favor of a fillibuster and against the wholesale whitewashing of Bush's illegal spying....still...it's more than we've been getting.

Even lip service gets some attention and raises the interest level of more people.

Sad, but at this point, lip service is better that out-and-out sellouts, because it leaves a sliver of hope. And when that last sliver of hope disappears, too many people will stop calling and writing their congressperson and standing on street corners with signs.