Please. If you see the coverage of Hillary as a "coronation," then I don't know what you're reading. Certainly not the letters sections of Salon, the Huffington Post, and other progressive sites. Certainly not the blogs. Certainly not CNN or the New York Times or MSNBC or right-wing talk or...

And the idea that this is some kind of "conspiracy" by Scherer and "Hillary supporters" is just too bizarre. Or it should be.

She has, for one reason or another, grabbed a large lead. I'm certainly surprised by it, but there it is. It's in polls, not secret deals in back rooms. And the front-runner gets the coverage. I don't know if that's a law of nature, but it's not a conspiracy. They do so many polls, they can't all be fixed. It's also clear that, once Hillary is out front, elements in the press, from the Rich/Dowd/Matthews axis of trivia to the Politico/National Review/Fox crowd, to find a chink in the armor, or, failing that, to make something up, so they can bring her down. The motivation for that is either psychosexual (Dowd, Matthews), to purely ideological (the right blogosphere), to a frustrated progressive wing.

Hillary seems to be like the Pats or USC: a well-run machine. Of course, Stanford beat USC, and the wheels can come off Hillary. I think the race will get closer during the foreshortened primaries. Obama or Edwards or one of the others does stand a chance, but they won't get it if they start sounding like Limbaugh on Hillary, or start cursing some cosmic conspiracy. That doesn't get people to trust you, or think of your candidate if Hillary is discovered calling up Satan in some coven in Dubuque.

A much better topic is, how did the primary season get so out of control? Why will it all be over so quickly? Whose idea was this? This foreshortened primary becomes, more than anything else, a money primary.

And Obama out-raised Hillary, and Edwards certainly had enough money. Why didn't they catch fire? Answering that question, and figuring out a way to get out of it, that's the trick you've got to pull.

when the apple ghouls and bashers stop being idiots.

As for Greenpeace, you should have been in the Maritimes when their campaign against sealing -- because the seals are threatened? No. Because it's cruel? No more than a slaughterhouse. No, the reason why is baby seals are cute, and you can raise a lot of money with those cute faces.

Anyway, the seal hunt ended, because of the Europeans refusing to take the pelts, in about 1983. In 1989, there I was in Venice, CA, and on the beach, what were they raising money from? A picture of a baby seal, which hadn't been hunted in six years. They built a $20 million headquarters in Boston on those baby seal pictures.

So now, they go after whatever will get them publicity. They're parasites, and they stopped being serious scientist-activists a long time ago.

I looked for a cover story in a "major newsmagazine" about Limbaugh, and I came up with this: http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19950123,00.html

Now, the incident may be simple bluster, bragging about what a tough guy he is and how he can get his way against these lily-livered liberals. If it took place the way he describes it, it's a class A felony to make those implied threats.

Might be interesting to phone up those writers and ask them if anything of the sort happened.

Really, our right wing has to learn that if they behave like mafiosi, they will be slapped down. (A political, free-speech thought entirely; no threats, implied or otherwise, were employed in the writing of this letter.)

Never watched much football, have you? It's called a misdirection play.

Amazon's music store is EMI - the open deal that Apple brokered - and Universal, who jumped up and down about DRM being necessary, maybe you should share your DRM with Microsoft so you could manage your Zune and your Samsung thingy in iTunes too - finally broke off negotiations on the basis that they wanted to control prices, not Apple. So fine, what did they do? Looking at EMI's success, they did what they said they wouldn't do and sold DRM-free music at a lower price than they want from Apple. Hmm. Guess they're giving a good price to Amazon, too. (I tried Amazon, and it's pretty nifty.) Oh, they're teaching Apple a lesson all right! (Laughs, snickers.)

The point? EMI down, now one more: Universal. Two more labels to go. How long until all four majors have dropped DRM? I'd say six months. Now, once the music is unlocked, the price war will really get going. I predict 25 cents a track in a year. Now, will the Apple "monopoly" be damaged? No. It wasn't a monopoly. The music's the loss leader for selling iPods, iPhones and iWhatevers. And business is vewy, vewy good. Thanks, Universal! Now Amazon has to pay some of the bandwidth charges, and the billing charges and everything. Thanks, Amazon! Now for the movie rental part of iTunes.

Oh, Sony Columbia, don't throw us in that briar patch like Universal did! Aah!

has a bill, with Amy Klobuchar, to make the evil cell providers... what, be forced to unlock their phones? No, prorate their fees for taking another provider. Will they demand that all phones be sold unlocked? Uh, no. Will they demand an end to roaming? Will they want interoperability? Will they demand high-speed wireless data? No, no, and no. And coinkindinkly, AT&T announces that prorating your early quitting fees is now THEIR policy!!! Huzzah for... reform!!!

Rockefeller is too rich to be knuckling under to the monopolists, irony of ironies. I guess he just has a case of family nostalgia.