Surely your bosses at RNC Headquarters let you drink on the job; how else could you write so badly?

In the sports you watch - which surely includes WWE Wrestling - punching, kicking, biting and using a "foreign object" are not even considered violations of the rules, but "scientific strategy." Kind of the way you RNC guys want to treat sick people, the unemployed and women, right?

And the biggest "winners" in other sports do the same. Drug-taking and leaded bats in baseball, deliberately dangerous driving in NASCAR, and referee-baiting in tennis are all fair game. Winning is the only thing, but wounding the opponent is a nice side benefit.

Although I will admit that anything that makes heterosexual women seem to care about women's sports might be a good thing. (Yes, I have seen the one-third-full stands at WNBA games in Orlando. Pathetic.)

Reich comes on and complains that Obama's not doing enough. Not that he has any concrete suggestions - his time in Clinton's White House didn't do very much - but he knows when something is wrong, and wants to say it. There are a lot of high horses in Academia, and Reich's horse is many hands high. Which means he's far above the people who actually have the problems.

His post is read at Republican Headquarters, and their hack staff writers - who post here under the avatars Zorkna, Elephantman, Philos777, and most recently Calvin Coolidge - spring into action. They (or he; it could be one guy) call(s) him a Godless Commie and N-word Lover who Betrays The Almighty Bush and Cheney. They openly don't care who gets fired, who starves, who can't get health care and who dies, just like their bosses in the GOP Congress, Senate and corporate boardrooms.

And nothing gets done. Just another Wednesday at Salon.

I don't know who these Wilburys are, and I don't care; superstars jostling each other's elbows are lousy entertainment. (Like when Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis tried to do a tour. Martin's neglect, drunkenness and Alzheimer's killed the show, and they replaced him with B-lister Liza Minelli. Less ego problems.)

O'Reilly and Beck are both attention hogs. They aren't considerate to anyone else, why should they work together now? This will turn out to be like Michael Jackson's Victory Tour, the financial and creative disaster that marked Jackson's collapse as an entertainer. They will be tired and old, they will get sick of each other, and they will end up sniping at each other out of boredom and egotism.

Real America, to clarify the definition, is anyplace that is not New York (home of gang violence, the Mafia and the even worse criminals of Wall Street) and Los Angeles (home of drugs, laziness, pretentiousness and self-delusion).

In other words, we're the people exploited by those two evil locations, known by the title of Starbuck's America. A place where you pay too much for mud boiled and served in a fancy paper cup. And that's the way they treat the rest of us.

People out here were the first to laugh at Palin, long before Tina Fey got approval from The Godfather to make fun of her on TV. Some of us have fallen under the spell of the Wicked Witch of Wasilla, true. But most of us are practical people who understand real life. And we realize what a pretentious, lying quitter Palin is.

You can buy the MP3 commentary of Twilight from the Riffrax crew - Mike Nelson, Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy of MST3K fame. Play back the MP3 while watching the DVD and realize how stupid the whole thing about "sparkly vampires" is. If you go to this site, you can get a brief video showing a sample of what the whole thing is like...

http://www.rifftrax.com/rifftrax/twilight

The essence of magic is misdirection. While you are paying attention to the scantily-clad, smiling Palin, the real menace - the bankers, corporate heads and Republican traitors to America - are pulling a massive bait and switch.

And, Ms. Walsh, you fell for it. Now go back and try to find out what you missed while you were staring at Zorkna and Something Really Stinks' party girl.

Largely, economics and success are illusions. People have to believe in something, whether God or economic solvency, in which they have no genuine evidence. And quite often, by doing so, they bring success into being.

By calling these things nonsense, you help bring about the economic collapse that all of us are fearing. Much as I'd like Obama to be Franklin Delano Roosevelt, he hasn't expressed any real faith in business or the economy. He hasn't convinced us that government cares for anything except propping up those wealthy entities that are "too big to fail." And everyone knows the Republicans whore even more to the wealthy and don't give a damn about us little people. This being the case, there's nothing for us to believe in, and that seals our doom.

About the US auto industry, I don't care. Its collapse was due to a lot of collusion; the stupidity of management, plus the collusion of the unions, plus oil politics, plus stupidity of buyers. But there isn't anything else that America makes any more. When these collapse, we'll officially be a third world nation, which not even Limbaugh can pretend isn't so.