I've never understood the appeal of the woman. Everything she says in here is trash. Her "surprising" and "quirky" perspective, limp liberals, is that she despises you. She loves kissing the iron boot of the conservative. Every single thing she says in here is wrong and stupid, and yet some of my compadres lap it up. Why do we "depend" on the success of Condi? She's probably the most incompetent Secretary of State in my memory. Are we supposed to lighten up because she's a woman? Because she's black, for God's sake? She's a fool who works for a monster.

How about the Good Soldier Powell? He's a good man, if he wasn't working for Simon LaCheney.

All this foolish prattler does is repackage the stupidest conservative pap and present it to you as the "hard truth." She's a huge con artist, nothing more.

But the weaker-minded among us seem to lap it up. I guess that's why we're going to have Governor Schwarzenegger, who has managed to bamboozle the center and the weak-minded liberals.

Happy New Republic to ya.

It's really just a music player, right?

And there are fifteen pages of passionate lovers of the iPod and haters.

I think Jobs, somehow, hit the mother lode.

For those who complain of its sound, yes, I too have spent multiple thousands on the living room stereo. Now some of my hundreds of CDs are on my iPod. I don't see any big problem here. When I can carry my 150-pound tower speakers and my 250-watt amp on my back, I'll throw away the iPod altogether.

First, there's the person who characterizes Lamont as a "right-leaning Democrat." On what basis? Has he not come out foursquare in favor of the abolition of private property? You mean, he's run a business, and has an old family connection to the Morgans? That's the connection that makes the right seem him as a Bolshevik, but you can never make both wingnuts happy.

Then there's the deprecators of the liberals from the ahem, right. The cryptic reference to "New York" and the "referendum on Israel." And this bold person, of course, posts anonymously.

Why has the iPod grown so quickly? (And yes, there are other portable music players, and they've grown too, just not as fast.)

Nobody mentions what it is socially: an end to radio. Hopefully, at some point, an end to all broadcast. If you guys can't program your music experiences, you're pitiful. One of the iPod's effects has been on radio programming, many of which are now giving you "shuffle play" with fewer announcers mucking up the programming with inane chatter.

And nobody mentioned podcasts. There are some great shows out there. I listen to music when I jog, and to podcasts when I drive back and forth from work. My radio hasn't been on for about two years.

All hail to the new media, and the iPod as its messenger!

And they should make a movie about Farhad Manjoo, and call it, "Trivial Minds."

If a man is going down for a lost cause, even if it's the Confederate cause, or the commandant of Paris in 1945 who refused, at least, to burn the city, then he gets pity. Robert E. Lee was certainly a noble person, who was working for the wrong side, by my lights. But Blackwell sees defeat welling up in front of him and what does he do? The equivalent of throwing grandmom into the whirlpool, the little kids, ANYTHING so he can be governor. God help Ohio if he makes it.

For those who want this whole game played less along party lines, I agree. But we can't take that seriously until we get public financing of candidates, new approaches to how people get elected that erodes the party duopoly, and a leveling of the playing field between people and corporations. Some 61% of the money being spent in this year's ballot initiatives in California, and that's a whole pantload, is being spent by corporate treasuries. At the end of every lying collection of half-truths and fibs going to defeat Prop 86-- there's probably one spot on some media every second of the day for the next two weeks -- they say "sponsored by Seniors Who Love Goodness, Firemen Who Ran into Our Paid Stooge Outside the Supermarket, and Phillip Morris." This is the citizen's referendum. Corporate "persons" should not get a deciding vote by telling lies for a month on TV. That's got to go. We have to at least debate the issues honestly every couple of years. And that means this commercial duopoly of two parties, one policy, have got to go.

What we have now is nothing but corporatism, and you know who bragged about that.

One 'umble suggestion. Can somebody tell all the "progressive radio" stations to stop taking that corporate handout? It's not like they're required to take that crap. They do it for money, and KTLK, for instance, in L.A., airs the occasional interview with Bobby Kennedy, or Clips from Clinton and Gore, and then they open the tap for three or four anti-environment, pro-big money commercials at a clip.