"For many feminists then, there is something almost perverse about actively choosing to do tasks that the women's libbers of the 1960s and 1970s fought so hard to reject."

To argue that this is what women's liberation was about, abandoning and prohibiting certain practices, is on par with saying that abolition was about rejecting cotton-picking. Women didn't have a choice when it came to these domestic practices and their companion aesthetic, but that same lack of choice would apply if the feminist ideal was a prohibition of everything that was formerly demanded. When I look to the advances of second-wave feminism, I see liberation from the compulsion to do this or that, but not necessarily this or that as such.

Obama should tone down, if not drop the kind of "save the middle-class" rhetoric he has been using for this whole election. This is not a matter of bending any kind of truth about class in America either, but facing up to the fact that middle-class is working class. When our economy tanks, it is not simply the lower-class who suffer, though their suffering is not as readily mitigated, especially after decades of neo-liberal and neo-conservative "structural adjustments."

The middle-class exist precisely for this kind of tension, and though Obama is on the upper end of that tax-bracket, he too WORKS for a living. Obama needs to stress that: working-class does not belong to the machinists and dock-workers only, but to a vast part of the population alienated from itself by the upward surge in wealth over the last at least eight years. This is a positive in-road for more skeptical Leftists, too, because if pulled off right it is a step towards rebuilding working-class solidarity.

The beautiful and sad part of this suggestion is that it isn't a matter of political conniving. It's a matter of being honest about an important issue, and it both connects him to unlikely voters and gives the true working-class an anchor for its interests, if not in Obama (I am not blind to his corporate backers) then in the campaign itself.

I do not see why a rural American would get nostalgic over Truman. He was responsible for two of the most atrocious political decisions in American history: dropping two Atomic Bombs and the second Red Scare that would gut American union leadership of its best and brightest for being Communist or associated with Communism.

This is a deeply underestimated political category.

I would like to see America hit rock bottom, knowing we've been there before and risen above it. Rather than see the ultimately apology for the failure of Capitalism, I would like to see the bailout rejected or delayed until it would be too late to implement. Maybe if the financial meltdown does spread to the real economy, our government will take a note from history and invest in The People, not corporate persons.

I'll admit, it really took The War too get us out of the slump, but mostly because America needed something in which to invest is social labour. There are wars to be waged against poverty, ignorance, disease, our crumbling infrastructure, dependence on fossil fuels and over-all ecological collapse. There is plenty for Americans to be doing that is a hell of a lot more important than fulfilling the dictates of your consumerist niche. The American people might as well get paid to do it.

Fuck the capitalist blackmail. That's all they have against us; We The People have history on our side.

Just for your daily recommended dose of irony, Carl Marks is an investment firm.

"Maybe the secret to adapting Chuck Palahniuk's novels into movies is not to take them so damn seriously. If David Fincher's "Fight Club" became a problematic monument in American film history by outdoing its source material in paranoid portentousness -- and by overwhelming it with cinematic technique..."

There is nothing worse than a film that matches if not out-does its literary source. I mean, when I see a re-make or otherwise filmic adaptation of a book, I'm not satisfied unless I'm not satisfied---only then am I satisfied. Maybe the secret to writing a film or book-review is to drop the consumerist resentiment and root for the piece of art that is done better, not deride a piece of art precisely because it's done better.

Those are the words that all too often introduce an opinion by someone too gutless to support it on their own.

"The American people are poised to do something that could not be imagined 10 years ago -- elect the best man president, regardless of his skin color."

I wonder when we will see this headline, but instead of "skin color" it'll say "income" or "class."

Kauffman is mistaken in his conception of the problem of meaninglessness. To Kauffman and those who think like him, that existence is meaningless is equivalent to saying that it can't be made meaningful. It's a deeply paranoid belief in the meaning of my existence being guaranteed by some Big Other (if not God, then Nature or History), without which life is unbearable. My objection to Kauffman's pessimism is that we are responsible for the meaning of our universe, of our lives---not the other way around. Meaninglessness does not preclude meaning. Kauffman suffers from what Sartre called "bad faith."