Before I knew what the film was about, I caught the trailer on-line. Every sentence Diane Lame uttered sounded weak, like a first draft, indeed like a place holder ("I'll think of something better later, gotta keep writing now"). She's often a terrific actress, but by the end of the trailer, I knew the movie couldn't be worth seeing if the dialogue was so predictable and bland.

Joan, what I heard Clinton saying wasn't racist, but technocratic: she was saying it's nice to have high-flowing rhetoric, but people like her get things done.

That's when my neutral feelings about her turned negative. I found her remarks incredibly tone deaf and insulting not to blacks or whites but to a nation that has been inspired by passionate rhetoric from the Founders, Lincoln, FDR, Kennedy, MLK, Robert Kennedy. Obama is clearly drawing on a vein of inspiration from our past to take us into the future. To me, she was arguing that poetry doesn't count, and wonkiness does. Bull. And shame on her.

Bill Clinton had just a touch of the poet in him, and I think he and Hillary are feeling outflanked and undone because Obama outshines anything either Clinton ever said or will say, and more importantly, he is the future. That's what I see when I look at him. That's what I feel when I listen to him and tears come to my eyes and I think, "Maybe, maybe we can rise out of the mire of the last seven years and regain our pride and humanity."

Fantastic is more like it.

Alex, please re-read the speech or watch the video. There was nothing empty, flowery, inflated about it. He spoke simply but eloquently, and more pointedly than is typical in such rebuttals.

I expect people on the cable news networks to routinely misuse the English language. I expect writers at salon.com to use it correctly.

If Clinton is the nominee, I will (somewhat) happily vote for her knowing that the Supreme Court & the Federal judgeships will not turn further right. I'll expect smart cabinet appointments, an AG who will admit that waterboarding is torture, withdrawal from Iraq, support of the Kyoto Accords, rollback of Bush's environmental plundering, and at least some pulling back from the authoritarianism in our national security apparatus. I'd love to see a woman president, but I don't trust her and have not trusted her ever since her vote on Iraq. I have never believed her murky and obfuscating explanations for the vote because too many politicians, analysts, military men, journalists, pundits, bloggers predicted Bush would invade Iraq no matter what. I believe she voted for the simple reason that she feared being tarred as weak on defense, and I resent her unwillingness to own up to her mistake as Edwards did. That suggests a rigidity that could be troubling in office.

To better understand the nature of Nemirovsky's purported anti-semitism in her novel David Golder, don't we need a much fuller description of the book, the characters and where such sentiments occur and how they fit into the story? Plucking them out at random doesn't tell us enough, and as a novelist, I know people could schlep quotes out of many of my books and claim this or that. Even if she did regret how she wrote the book, what's not clear is did she regret the mere writing of such sentiments or was the regret larger?

As an author, I think it's incumbent on me to spend my check on buying books to support the industry that supports me.

His statement is actually a palindrome, in Urdu, and I would blush to repeat here what it is he is truly saying about Senator Clinton. The mind reels at Senator Obama's hideous and unprovoked attack on Clinton. Who does he think he is, George Bush setting his sites on Iraq? For shame.

Sometime in the last week or so, Nagourney wrote that Clinton got more delegates than Obama did in Michigan and Florida. That's a very sloppy, misleading statement because Obama got zero delegates in Michigan since he wasn't on the ballot. Had you written in a vote for him, it would have been discounted. Shouldn't Nagourney have been more careful? Shouldn't his editor have noticed? Shouldn't the NYT hold itself to a higher standard than Fox?

I was impressed that in his most recent speech, Obama mentioned being a teacher of Constitutional law and that he respects the Constitution--which means he will close Gitmo's prison and restore habeas corpus.

I've been really surprised that the assault on the Constitution has simply been off the radar screen at every debate--nobody asks a question about the rights we have lost in the last seven years.

Is Obama engaged in mere verbiage? No--because as a state legislator he worked to make sure that police interrogations were videotaped. That's enough to make me trust him.

This piece in the Washington post lays out his record on that bill, which was not an easy one to get passed:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/03/AR2008010303303.html