Kaplan says: "Sasha and Malia will be the ones to watch".

Or you can just leave them alone. They're just little girls and didn't ask for this so quit scrutinizing their every move. Of course the press in general will have a field day with them but I hope Salon with have the decently and good taste to put a moratorium on covering them.

On the Chad scale of bad behavior (known better as the CSBB)--with 0 being harmless and 10 being a serial killer--smoking ganga with friends rates a 0.1. Puppy killing is 5.6.

I hope this solves the controversy.

...just for some perspective; being the head of a bank that took bailout money and then paying yourself any more than minumum wage is 6.8 on The CSBB.

HH: "Yes, it's true, Millan doesn't entirely approve of projecting our emotional needs onto our dogs. But what does he know?"

A lot!

HH: "What does he (Cesar Millan)know of the deep pathological neediness that lurks in mortal souls?"

Again, A lot!

Cesar is a fairly recent immigrant who comes from a culture that still retains a very strong sense of community and family. He has written about the loneliness and lack of connection he has observed in Americans and how they ofter display this by infantilizing their pets.

You might want to check if your distemper shots are current. Nowhere in my letter was I defending any person –or culture that mistreats animals (and yes, Mexico has egregious animal abuse problems).

My comments were about how Cesar thinks that many Americans treat their dogs like little human babies and not as a species that have very different needs.

By the way, the kind of pet owners that I just mentioned are often socially retarded morons: the kind of people who can’t critically read a simple paragraph— and often like to name their dog’s shits after people they don’t even know.

Down bitch, down!

Paglia: "The failure of liberals to master the vibrant medium of talk radio remains puzzling."

I don’t think it’s puzzling at all. First of all I don’t find talk radio to be a particularly vibrant medium to begin with. If I want news or commentary I like to get it from a wide range of print and internet sources. If I happened to be stranded in a car I have dozens of interesting and thoughtful podcasts and 15,000 songs in my iPod to choose from. Rarely, if ever, do I have the desire to turn on the radio and just listen to some gas bag give me second rate commentary sprinkled with ad hominem attacks and watered down analysis. Air America has some good programming but for the most part listening to someone like Al Frankin (who I like) just bloviate off the cuff is almost as annoying as listening to a complete ass hat like Rush Limbaugh.

I think the average liberal is more wired, more willing to read, more likely to seek out thoughtful commentary and much more likely to distrust the random ruminations of rating seeking shock jockeys than his/her conservative counterpart.

There isn’t much of a puzzle to it!

Camille Paglia loves making bold, unsubstantiated statements that are poorly thought out and are generally meant to shock more that make people think. It’s no wonder that she twitterpates so much over talk radio--it’s just like her.

Dogs aren’t cheap. But to put it into perspective, owning a medium sized dog isn‘t as expensive as lets say buying a coffee at Starbucks everyday, eating out once a week or your average annual cable bill. Hell, if you add up the amount of stupid and completely unnecessary crap the average American buys every year (and then throws away) you can afford to own a whole pack of Great Danes!

The real price to owning a dog is not the money but the time and attention it requires to walk, play with and train your dog so she’s healthy, well adjusted and has the companionship she needs. For those of us that really love dogs this is a small price to pay for what we get in return.

For those who aren’t willing to put in the time and energy to be a responsible pet owner --or that buy dogs for reasons of vanity, status or just on a whim (but it was soooo cute), let me suggest an iPhone instead.

I’m happy to see an article commemorating the 200th birthday of Abraham Lincoln. However, another great man, Charles Darwin, celebrates his 200th today as well and Salon is eerily silent about it.

I just want everyone to know that I was objectifying women in bikinis--and knew it-- long before this article made it cool or science confirmed it.

While I'm at it I'm going to assert (before some blowhard academics blow 100,000 bucks in tax funded grant money to prove it) that naked chicks get men to do really dumb shit.

Remember, you heard it from me first folks!

Joan: ”Democrats fought the surge and the surge -- sort of -- won.”

With what skewed and twisted measuring stick do you claim such a tentative victory? Is it by how subdued and browbeaten the local population is? Is it the opportunity to steal their oil with less resistance? Is it because less of our soldiers are dying every month?

However you measure that we “sort of—won” it won’t erase that it was a deeply immoral, preemptive war of aggression based on lies and a warped, geopolitically challenged mindset. Over four thousand young men and women are dead on our side and well over a half a million on there side. Our country is full of mentally and physically wounded vets and we have mortgaged our national soul to wage this horrid conflict. Please, explain to me how you get any kind of ‘win’ out of this?

Joan:“Now what do we do in Iraq?”

Get out now!