Notwithstanding the tabloid headline, more worthy of the New York Post than Salon, this article is about 1,000 times more edifying and thought-provoking than the recent cover about Michelle Obama's Big Ass. Whomever greenlighted this piece, even if it was Joan Walsh, deserves much credit for putting this deeply disturbing issue out front, even if it is during President's Week, when a large swath of the readership is trying to get laid at some vacation resort.

As for the issues themselves, the bottom line is we hit "1984" back in 1970, and things have been getting worse ever since. The idea that we could ever return to a world where individual privacy is a valued and respected concept, when we're living in a world with tens of billions of personal computers, cell phones, pda's and databases to populate them all, is a childish fantasy. Once medical records are all automated, a centerpeice of Obama's health care policy revolution, DNA exposure will be as a hangnail to a giant.

I hope more than a few thinking people read this exceptional article, and I applaud Mr. Dizikes for compiling and writing it. Sadly, I believe we're so far down the road of useful idiotdom, indifference to science, and wholesale distraction by various forms of hand-held tech that most of us will be far more captivated by the latest Blackberry that provides autoerotic "stimulus" with a simple key push..."coming" soon, along with National Identity Cards, implanted RIF chips at birth, lipstick surveillance cameras everywhere and more and more refined versions of Orwell's DoubleSpeak. "War is Peace", "Freedom is Slavery", "Ignorance is Strength". Are We There Yet?

No, we can't. Ms. Pelosi the Younger went on Rachel Maddow last week and said there are "two Americas"; Rachel didn't agree with her, but I do. I don't want to talk to the McCain-Palin Americans, because most of them are either morons, haters, functioning illiterates or religious wingnuts, or some combination of these four states of mind and heart. The few exceptions to this archetype-rational, intelligent people who could actually support McCain/Palin-are a figment of Pelosi's re-imasgination. Show them to me, let me hear them speak, and maybe I'd believe it. I don't think these exceptions exist, except in the pandering vision of Pelosi and her idealized journalistic self-image.

As fof the zealots that are real, yes, they're on both sides, but I'd rather deal with the zeal of a secular humanist than a right-wing Christian extreme idealogue with a junk education, who doesn't read newspapers or books, who thinks Hannity and O'Reilly are more than the pumped up demagogues they actually are (O'Reilly has Dick Morris appear as a political "expert"--Dick Morris!).

I served my country in the military 40 years ago, but now I'm ashamed of the jerks and bigots who've multiplied in this country like parasites in someone's colon, and who thought an enfeebled "hero" like McCain, or a right-wing nutjob like Palin, with the intellect of a supermarket checker, should be running this nation from the White House, instead of a Harvard-educated lawyer and Senator married to a Princeton and Harvard-educated woman.

C'mon, most of these lily white "conservatives" think of Obama and his wife as mud people, and the obvious word they'd use to describe them in private, everyday, colloquial conversation is the N-word, plain and simple. It's disingenuous at best for Pelosi to avoid this subject like the plague, throughout this interview, except when she obliquely refers to the white homogeneity of McCain-Palin campaign crowds. Gee, I wonder why that is? Could it be blacks and Latinos and Asians are just not welcome there? DOH!

There ARE two Americas, and for the rest of my life, I plan to stay on the east coast, and fly over the moral and social cesspool in the middle, except for Chicago, the exception that proves the rule. Great city, Chicago. BTW, Obama lived there.