Love you, Keef, but you've referred to a gallows and drawn a picture of a guillotine.

Everything about the new format is bad. It's not a matter of resistance to change. The front page is chaos (and no longer even has a link to the comics page), the ads are more intrusive that ever, and TMW (the reason I originally came to Salon years ago and one of the few reasons I've remained) is illegible. I wonder how many people use Salon just for the cartoons. They risk losing all of them, or nearly all, with this incompetent design. I'm sure I can find some other way to view the cartoons somewhere on the web. In the past I would have said that that would be less convenient than using Salon, but that's just not true any longer. I think Salon has lost me. Losing eyeballs by catering too much to your advertisers is not a real good strategy, guys.

I want to send my sincerest condolences to Keef on his loss. As one who takes uncling seriously, I can only hope to live as rightly and be remembered as fondly by nieces and nephews as Keef's Uncle Owen. Peace be upon him.

Louis really should have been tipped off by those unlikely words. But has anyone ever gotten hip to that kind of thing in time? It's a priceless detail in an excellent entry in the excellent "Louis" series. Even though I should know what to expect by this point, there's an unexpected shock of recognition every time.

Is this the first time Louis has been seen carrying an instrument case? I haven't noticed it before. Looks like about the size and shape of a clarinet case to me.

As of this morning, there are at least two separate drives for resolutions here in St. Louis prohibiting sale to any group that includes Mr. Limbaugh, regardless of the size of his share. That may not fly, but one hopes that the vocal nature of the opposition is enough to make everyone involved think twice.

I wouldn't say that religion is contrary to our nature. Plenty of folks thrive on the kind of ritual, structure, and obedience to authority that are part of a religious life. What is contrary to our nature is belief on demand. Human beings are essentially not capable of deciding what to believe and then believing it. Belief is independent of the will, and to try to make oneself believe things one doesn't actually believe is a tiring and fruitless effort. The resultant cognitive dissonance is one of the reasons why so many people in this culture are so nutty and so unhappy. People who don't believe in primitive superstitions as a rule should re-examine whether they actually believe in God-Man or whether perhaps they're responding to societal programming.

... "Nazi" = bad

"Liberal*" = bad

ergo "Liberal" = "Nazi"

qed

Congratulations to Mr. Frank. It is well past time that elected officials showed that kind of courage. If there are problems with the proposal, by all means let's discuss them. But there is no reason whatsoever to encourage or validate that kind of idiocy by engaging with it.

*(not that there's anything really liberal in the proposal, or that they know what the word means; it's just something they've been told to attach to everything about the current executive)

I don't know the actual origin of the aphorism, but in modern times, Malachy McCourt has it as "RESENTMENT is like taking poison etc." And of course, the Buddha said "You won't be punished for your anger. You'll be punished BY your anger."

Well said. I hope I didn't seem to suggest that the two factions differ materially from one another in the matter. They're crips and bloods, or Gottis and Gambinos if you prefer: their styles may differ somewhat, but their methods are largely the same and their underlying goals identical. The profits they deliver are to the same class of sponsors, if not to the exact sample people.

"He's continuing Bush's policies which the Right supported, so why don't they think he's the Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread?"

It’s a question that would make sense outside of politics. After all, President Obama’s policies are proauthoritarian, promilitarist, procorporatist, and prochristianist; meaningful differences between him and the previous occupant of the post, or between him and his 2008 electoral opponent, are hard to find. Republicans should, in theory, like him as well as they do either of those other men.

But this is politics. The same things were true of President Clinton, and he, too, was despised and reviled by the opposing faction. This is because they were and are, whether ‘in name only’ or not, members of the opposing faction, a sin greatly compounded by the fact of their popularity.

Be for real. You’re either with them (i.e., wearing their gang colors) or you’re against them. Substance has practically nothing to do with the public face of political rhetoric.

"... we're all too busy laughing our asses off at the notion of Sarah Palin as a presidential contender."

I'm old enough to remember when that was by far the most common reaction whenever the name of Ronald Reagan was uttered. Same for both Georges Bush. It's enough to make one nervous. Especially when you ask yourself why it was that the republican party sachems picked her as a running mate in a doomed presidential campaign. It couldn't have been to bring her to national prominence and create name recognition and TV-Q for her, could it? Why might they have wanted to do that for a vacuous beauty queen who could probably be very easily coaxed into following instructions?

Looking for a reason why ordinary joes spend all that money on sports? I’m pretty sure Thorstein Veblen would have called it “vicarious leisure” and “conspicuous consumption” as part of an aspiration to upward class mobility. His standard treatise on the subject is “The Theory of the Leisure Class” (1899).