How appropriate was it? The speech was a vivid recreation of what must have been going on in people's minds as they were getting shot. He blamed it on chance. Somebody fainted -- perhaps on cue from the little chubby guy in the corner -- and he carried the person out. Then stood on a tank that happened to be there. Well, I guess we're lucky he didn't bring his bullhorn.

I don't understand the appeal of the guy, never have. A terrible disaster happens, and he goes and stands in the spotlight that supplies. This has been his consistent strategy from his first photo-ops, like the one in front of Rushmore.

Well, thank God he didn't say, "In the battle against crazed loners with guns that John Ashcroft thought it was find for him to have, the NRA has prevailed."

Glenn Greenwald, the guy who zeroes in on the most relevant facts about everything so I'm constantly saying, "Yes, that's exactly it!" Or, "I hadn't thought of it, but how right you are," finally says something completely crazy.

Let's grant that marijuana being on Schedule I is a crazy relic of the Nixon administration's War on Blacks and Hippies, and some of the other classifications are highly debatable, but that's a political thing. The reason that prescriptions are mostly very necessary is because the man who's been given the power to write them has 8 or more years of training, has at least read the writeups on the drugs he prescribes, and knows dosages and so on. He knows what painkillers a heart patient needs when he breaks his knee, and how much, and how long, and how many times to renew it so the world is less littered with glassy-eyed Darvocet addicts.

And the doctor knows the side-effects, so there's someone to call when you start seeing spots in front your eyes. It's not perfect, but there needs to be a gatekeeper. Medication just isn't, for 99.9%, a DYI hobby.

"When kept safely for the purposes of voluntary, unpaid service in a state-sponsored self-defense unit, such as a posse or a unit of the National Guard, American citizens may have military-style weapons that the governor deems necessary. However, each individual's right to self-defense, guaranteed by a long history in Common Law, is subject to sensible restrictions by state and federal governments for the purposes of public safety."

Just a back-of-the-envelope attempt to get to the meat of it.

Fewer guns = less violence. Our gun culture is not, at this point, a culture of freedom, but a primitive cargo cult that uses the weapon as a fetish.

I've got to say, when the media moan and pee their pants about the decline of newspapers, the truth is, they're failing because they're crap. I was, during these times, reading more and more of the blogs, from local papers across the world, including the Knight Ridder reports. It's the guys in the big newsrooms, the guys with the big satellite dishes pointed at themselves, who are clueless. The CBS guy doesn't surprise me. Like the garden-variety sociopath, they don't think they've done anything wrong.

For the record, it was also meaningful as hell. Not racist towards blacks or Jews except to those who didn't get it. See, Joe was in a minstrel show, in blackface. Now, that meant he wasn't what he pretended to be, a Democrat. Remember, the men in blackface were white. They pretended to be sombody they didn't really care about much. (The picture didn't mention Lieberman's Jewishness at all, did it? Does that mean you can't politically lampoon him beause... he's Jewish? He gets the exemption? I don't think so. He was being assaulted over his position on the war, not his race or religion.) However, the picture was too easy for people who didn't understand it to get hurt about. A Jewish man in a minstrel show. Maybe interesting meta-criticism of his whole 'act,' but too easy for FOX to turn into one of their vaudeville routines, so Jane apologized to short-circuit it. Like the clamor that greeted Durbin's perfectly correct reaction to the description of Guantanamo, you could hear it mounting, and there was going to be no explaining of an actual idea in those circumstances. That's the way I took it.

By the way, and perhaps no accident, Tammy Bruce was once the head of the L.A. chapter of NOW, but on her talk radio show, she couldn't stop her racist remarks about the OJ trial, nor could she stop herself later when she insulted Camille Cosby as mentally unstable and so on after her son had been murdered. For this, she was too much even for the right-wing talk station KFI. See http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh121803.shtml

Isn't it interesting that she calls her removal from NOW and her firing from KFI "political correctness"? She didn't have to apologize then, you see? She had enshrined herself in the FOX hierarchy as another leftist crucified for speaking "the truth."

It doesn't matter, in that convoluted and awkward sentence, what that "obviously" modifies, the verb "I think" or "be," though the word order certainly makes it seem that it's modifying the latter. It's a glancing point at best, and it's plausible that he meant he would obviously be president.

I remember all the Nazis we took down into the basement and tortured during the Second World War, because they did, after all -- oh, wait a minute, we didn't. Back then, we were being run by decent men, not by hysterical, evil men like Bush and Cheney.