In the denouement of Ferris Buhler, at a first-run showing of the movie, when the attendance guy finally caught Buhler, I screamed out loud in the theater, "KILL the fucker!"

Buhler, like most of these teenage "heroes," was smug and contemptuous, and the people around him were tools or co-conspirators who weren't as "cool" as he was.

Perhaps what sickened me the most was Hughes's inability to get beyond jokey behavior. The Breakfast Club had one of the kids taking a pistol to school. A few years later, no teenager with any real problems would hesitate to use a pistol, on himself or preferably on a whole lot of other kids. (My ex-girlfriend, a teacher, was surprised that the kid only got detention and not expulsion. I was suprised that the kid didn't blow away Molly Ringwald and the greasy goth girl, then himself. That would have been a movie with significance.)

Being a teenager DOES suck. Hughes still believed in, and promoted, happy endings. There are no happy endings in real life. He might have done a great service by saying that.

...you show the typical sympathy of the Republican ruling class. If you're sick, old, out of work or poor, it's your fault and you deserve to die.

You pull these figures you quote about how far retirement is supposed to go, out of thin air, and expect to win people to your argument. Although you are right that mortgage fraud is involved; the rich guys who pay you to write these pieces and post them on Salon made their wealth on mortgage fraud, medical fraud, drug fraud, all kinds of economic fraud.

Obama trusted the banks. He shouldn't have. Maybe he's learned, and maybe he'll do something to rein them in, or maybe do the right thing and nationalize them and imprison their operating staffs and executives.

In case you didn't know, he's the Republican operative whose paid job is to write letters to Salon to insult Obama, health care, non-white people, non-rich people, non-healthy people, anyone whom Dick Cheney and Rupert Murcock thinks should crawl into a corner and die. Look around the LTTE's and you'll find his posts.

He would be perfect there. He would love the celebrity and the chance to promote Limbaugh beliefs on TV (since Rush's own TV appearances have been disasterous). We can be sure that with Elephantman behind the judge dais, there would be fewer nonwhite winners, fewer rap artists of any color, fewer gay and lesbian contestants, and fewer people with any talent who would advance on the show. American Idol would become the show it was meant to be; a fake, illegitimate, hypocritical display of talent with predestined winners.

I believe it was he who said that Jewish men and women would get their noses fixed, they would meet, marry, and have children with noses the size of Casaba melons.

More seriously, speaking as an ugly person, with traits that repel women, I really wish I could afford those kind of surgical enhancements. All I can do at social functions is put a bag over my head (hopefully a paper one so I can still breathe) and sit in a corner, hoping nobody notices me.

I don't like it that my genetic destiny means I must be alone for all of my life, but unless I can steal, embezzle or accidentally win a lot of money, that's how it looks.

They learned a long time ago how to capture the media - a media, incidentally, that the neocons own lock, stock and transmitter frequencies.

Simply claiming that the disruptors at every Democratic-announced event are "outside agitators" won't do any good. Remember how their protesters - all of them identified Republican Party operatives - won Bush an undeserved second term?

I suggest that whenever these people appear at Democratic events, anyone who really wants to stop them should attack them. Physically. Blackened eyes, broken teeth, bloodied. Yes, that will get the attacker in jail, but it will also get the Republican legbreaker in jail - and it will be obvious when a RNC or Big Pharma operative bails them out, and can be documented and proved. (Lifting the wallet of the legbreaker, and proving he came from out of state to disrupt things, would also be a good move.)

These actions are quasi-legal? They're not as polite and dainty as writing a letter to the editor? Well, do you want to win or do you want Elephantman to crow about how he and his fellow Klansmen were able to stop that non-white President? (Of course, he wouldn't use the word "non-white.")

These rich bastards and...what is the female term for them? Bastresses!...are the people who sold our nation out to China and India, are fighting health care reform and want to turn America into a third-world nation. They want poor, grovelling people at their feet to worship them. And that's what this fiction is all about.

If only it were possible to summon the ghosts of Harris and Klebold to come back and provide their unique solution to all these kids in exclusive private schools.