I watched this last night in disbelief. There's no way he could have moved there and not known it was a gay area. A real estate agent or broker would have told him if he had, somehow, never heard of the Castro. And nobody moves without doing some research into the neighborhood. He's a provocateur, deliberately trying to force people to behave in ways he thinks are acceptable. Specifically gay people, because he would never dare move into an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood and complain about the streets being crowded with dancing men on Simchas Torah, or how there was too much kosher food in the supermarket. He's on this sick campaign because it's been explicitly encouraged by bigotry from the top, from Congress, from the President.

I don't loathe this man, I resent his pushing his beliefs on a majority-gay neighborhood. The Castro is one of the few neighborhoods in the country where gay people can be themselves. And yes, for some gay people, sex toys are part of being gay, and they don't think those toys should be hidden away behind curtains in stores with discrete window displays. If he doesn't like his kids seeing the store, there's a simple solution that doesn't involve moving: Don't walk by it. Tell your kids not to walk by it. But I don't think he can make that adjustment, and my guess is he would start complaining about same-sex affection disaplayed in public and leather daddies and drag queens if the store veiled its contents. He sounds plausible to some people (evidently), but his eyes and the very improbability of his situation revealed the truth.

"Is it because of the number of rich and powerful Jewish people that run things in the U.S.?"

Of course it is, Anonymous. Duh! Everything is due to or caused by the Jews who "run things" in the US. Ken Lay? Jewish. Real name, Laybowitz. George Bush? Jewish. Real name, Bushinsky. Condi Rice? She's an Ethiopian Jew. They're all Jews. Jews run everything, the media, the Big Three Auto Companies (Henry Ford only pretended to be an anti-semite to throw people off his tracks), the oil companies, you name it. That includes Salon, of course, so brave Anonymous, if you think you're really anonymous, watch out, because they know what you think and you might find out messing with the Jews isn't as safe as you think.

You can adorn this fluff with Adorno, but it's still fluff. And then there's the assertion:"Everyone who hears about it loves "Snakes on a Plane."

Says who?

I watched the video several times and Bush wasn't near that guy's butt. The guy was sitting down, how could Bush have pinched his butt? The guy does sit up and down quickly so maybe Bush jabbed his shoulder or something like that.

Which doesn't remotely take away from the unbecoming, degrading, sexist behavior of our representative on the world stage. If Clinton had been caught doing this; chewing with his mouth open; saying Yo Blair, the Daily News would have blasted him with a SHAME! headline and the right wing would have run with it for days.

They used to say that in America, anyone can become president. Now we have proof. Anyone has.

Okay, was the reporter actually there?

Was she paying attention at all or lost in her iPod playlist?

Was she drunk or hung over?

Was she working with some political agenda of her own?

Questions, questions, questions.

If Salon is going to have someone explore territory which has been stomped flat by countless essayists over the last twenty years, PLEASE do some editing. Real editing.

As an author and essayist, I don't understand how could anyone let an insight as banal as this pass for an epiphany:

"Time goes by -- so slowly" -- and all I could think was that time goes by so quickly. And that sometimes, like tonight, it can fold in on itself, and remind us of how far away we are from our old selves, our old bodies, our old memories even as we experience things that bring the past to mind."

This is as shallow and empty as the song it valorizes.

Oh, well, maybe it's time for Salon to do another breathtaking piece on Jennifer Aniston . . .

"Then again, Smith does stage a romantic moment against that act of bestiality, but let's not get ahead of ourselves."

So what was the romantic moment?

Well, however dismal the movie is, you have to give the director/writer credit for outdoing George Lucas in sheer vapidity.

I thought the noun "Sith" was inane, unappealing, and not remotely threatening (or even interesting). But "Scrunt," "Narf," and "Tartutic" beat those by a mile.

They're so rodiculous they may enetr pop culture and inspire a new drinking game, or parodies in Clerks 3: "Man, he offered me some steak tarturic but it made me want to narf all over the table. What a stupid scrunt!"

Wait a minute. Spector shows signs of not being an ideologue because he played squash with Carl Levin? What on earth does that prove? Unless there's some Republican Senators Code that one can't play any game or engage in any sport with the opposite side.

And one of his aides now works for a Democrat? Aren't we scraping the barrel for

proof of--well, what exactly? That he's nice to Democracts and hasn't had his staffers take an oath of lifelong aversion to Democrats? Next we'll hear that he'd traded fashion tips with Hillary Clinton, or shared a hot dog with Chuck Schumer or bummed a smoke from Barney Frank.