You don't have to get all uppity about party philosophies and things like that. But given the "Clear Skies" initiative, an atheist position on Global Warming, very oil-industry-centric views on everything, if you're an environmentalist, endorsing any Republican makes absolutely zero sense. I don't know how to explain this to Mr. Pope or Ms. Griscom Little. The Republican Party wants to rape the planet. That's not "partisan," that's just looking clearly at the past 5 and a half years. A small cluster of Democrats and moderate Republicans have been able to hold back the very worst of it, but that's the way it is.

To work with Republican moderates, fine. But any lobbying organization that somehow regards the R or the D after a congress critter's name is irrelevant needs to go back to Poli Sci. Endorse a Green, if you want to be idealistic, and make a brave, losing gesture. Endorse the Democrat in 2006, you morons, to have any chance of regaining environmental sanity. Don't you know the game you're playing?

But maybe I shouldn't be surprised by such dunderhead plays from the elitist Sierra Club, whose membership recently barely turned back, twice, the proposition that illegal immigrants are a form of pollution.

For a bit a sanity. It seems the majority of the respondents here can't think of erections -- above all, their erections -- without sneering, making snarky remarks about feminists and loose broads. We're obviously falling backwards in our quest for sexual nirvana.

Are sexy.

Dumb chicks? Not so much.

"There has only been one rationale, as you know, Helen, and this that Saddam Hussein had resisted -- what is the proper number? -- 17 United Nations resolutions."

So that's why. I wonder if the Bushies know how stupid and arrogant that makes us sound in the Middle East, especially since Israel has been ignoring or evading a number of U.N. resolutions for a generation.

And before I get the angry denials, I'm not arguing the rights and wrongs here, just the appearances. The average Joe in Cairo wonders, bitterly, why we haven't invaded Israel to enforce the borders the UN set.

I know next to nothing about the Duke case. Deliberately. I figure it's one of those local matters that you just have to want to overwhelm you like an OJ case (which I ignored as much as possible, too). But I do know that Hannity is on the case every other night, and the FOX commentators are all so sure that the boys are innocent babies, and the woman is a slut, that I tend to take the other side -- though I don't, really, because I'm blissfully unaware of the facts, see?

When I see what seems like an organized claque here in Salon all denouncing an author who raises questions about -- not the guilt or innocence, but the propriety of the wristbands while they're playing in a Duke-sanctioned event -- then I'm sure that a major reactionary effort is underway. It's not that they believe the boys are innocent -- they obviously do -- but that they seem to think there's an open hunting season on white kids, spurred on by dirty, n-word-loving D.A.'s -- that I smell a whiff of something that's not so good. We keep hearing about their persecution by that insane -- but reelected -- DA, and about the fiendish opposition which I never hear a thing from.

And I'm telling you, I'm not prejudging the case itself, but the coverage, which seems to me a bunch of politically-motivated, emotion-inflaming nonsense. Does anybody notice that the content we're getting is all from the defense? I think that's because there are constraints on what the prosecution can say, right?

I think the judge in this case ought to declare a gag order on all pre-trial publicity, and then get down to business. And let the facts decide. If they're innocent or guilty, let a jury decide. That's good enough for me. Is it not good enough for you?

Back in the early-to-mid-'80s, I lived in Canada. On the TV for the first time during those years was a channel called "Much Music," which was a Canadian MTV that ran out of Toronto. And who was the lead VJ? John Roberts. Then, John signed a contract in the US... as a CBS TV reporter. I mean, CBS particularly always kept an eye on the CBC for young news talent -- it's where Morley Safer came from, after all -- but I remember that announcement as an eyebrow-raising one.