1. Eliminating sugar tarrifs eases too-high corn prices;

2. Increasing sugar demand raises too-low sugar prices;

3. Modify your car to run on Coca Cola!

AND! Longer-term goal: Builf cars that run on DIET Coke!

"Squirm-inducing" and "minstrel show" convinced me the the Chief should go. An analogy:

What if the M.I.T. "Fighting Geniuses" had a mascot named Rabbi Einstein?

It's the mascots:

Notre Dame has a Cartoon Leprechaun, not an IRA Bomber; San Diego has a Tubby Happy Monk, not a Conquistador with Cross in one hand and Bloody Sword in the other hand. Silly mascots seem to be okay, if they are not offensive.

Cleveland might keep the Indians. Chief Wahoo, their mascot is silly, but also offensive. Cleveland should play up the fact that their original Indian was Nap Lajoie, one of their great players.

Only sometimes are the names themselves at issue. Remember the Baltimore Bullets?

Garrison got the number of horns right. The Beast

has ten horns on seven heads. Is that five heads with two horns each, and two heads with no horns? Let's have lunch and talk about it.

Do they put the fortunes into the cookies BEFORE or AFTER they bake the cookies?

This Libby trial gives us ammo to use against Cheney when we charge him with fraud, for lying us into Iraq. And Cheney's fraud trial will provide ammo to use against W. Bush.

Is this very much different from Americans' desire for white teeth? My dad's tan teeth used to be okay, but some marketeer came up with Whitening Toothpaste, and now I aspire to white teeth, like they have in Hollywood.

Every brand of American toothpaste promises whitening. Maybe decades ago, the first guy who sold "whitening" toothpaste at a lowish price made a killing at the base of the American pyramid. But now, it's no big deal, and it does not cost very much.

My point: All this Base Of The Pyramid stuff probably is just fancy, moralistic talk about ordinary marketing and consuming behavior. How much does Fair & Lovely cost? I guess they already have several lower-cost competitors: Pale & Perfect, Ghostly & Ghastly, and so on.

P.S. I doubt that any of these products works any better than American whitening toothpaste. I now have white-enough teeth, but I had to go to the dentist. Are we starting to see Base Of The Pyramid dentists in India?

Wow! That's the sort of word the Combine looks for!

Americans elected these people because Americans prefer and enjoy the paranoid, bullying, brutal, bad-grammar, anti-rational stuff. Americans have no excuse, such as down-trodden, backward Middle Eastern nations may have.

Americans just like this stuff. Maybe humans just like this stuff. Maybe there is no hope.

Glenn Greenwald, please keep on writing, though. Let's all go down writing, and fighting too, I guess.

Dear Al Gore of Sportswriters,

Please do not say that Rulon Gardner is the Jack Bauer of Wrestlers, if you mean it as a compliment. Rulon never has tortured.

We need to get Kiefer Sutherland, the Jack Bauer of TV Stars to endorse Al Gore, the Al Gore of Presidential Possibilities.

You, King, are a celebrity. Do you know Kiefer? Do you know Al? Can you help with this?

Were any of the Supreme Court in on these right-wing war games? Any of the folks who handed the 2000 election to Bush/Cheney/Rummie?

During World War II, Ben Shahn created a poster showing a shackled man with a bag over his head. The title was, "This is Nazi Brutality."

Take a look:

http://www.chgs.umn.edu/Visual___Artistic_Resources/Absence_Presence/General_Tour__Absence_Presence/Ben_Shahn/ben_shahn.html

Does this not look like American Brutality at Abu Ghraib?

"School board President Peter Breslin said the decision to suspend the students was... about insubordination."... "We are very committed to free expression and we do not tolerate censorship in our district."

This is a great example of our own left-leaning idiot fringe. We see this a lot in the context of education.

Doctrinaire-yet-limited teachers and principals often cause trouble with this sort of fuzzy thinking. It's not limited to the right wing.

"Every American's... Canadians'" is correct! Great work! Keep it up!

Do you think the President knows how to pronounce "W" in Spanish?

In Greek terms, Bush might be Agamemnon's uncle Copreus, which name means, "Turd." Everybody who knows about the real Thermopylae will see this movie, and hope that it is more historically/legendarily correct than "Troy" and "Alexander."

Reinforcing an earlier poster's recommendation: "Gates of Fire" by Steven Pressman (circa early 21st Century CE) is a wonderful historical novel about Thermopylae.

It's A Beautiful Day, First Album

and

The Electric Flag, First Album

Much better, and much more important than much of the stuff on this list of 200. Musicians' choices.

Not on the list! Yikes! Ridiculous!

(2. Several people have commented on the absense of Kinks' albums. Keep in mind, though, that the Kinks did not put their albums together very well. Only Kinks Greatest Hits albums reall are any good as albums. Same might be said for the Temptations.)

Dan, the poster who just saw the movie, may be wrong, but he actually has looked at the movie, fer cryin out loud.

Let us make a pact to come back here, and evaluate the thing after we watch it.

Seems obvious, but obvious is SOOOOOOOO unfashionable.

Real love. Not just the way I feel when I see how cute Shania Twain is.

Back when reality made a difference, this story would have brought down the American President and all his pals. It still should. It is outrageous.

But now, we have so much information, and so much baloney running past our eyes and our ears that this is a minor story, easily dismissed, if somebody wishes to dismiss it, as Leftie Propaganda.

Too bad! What in the world do these people in power need to do before Americans focus on their crimes? Perhaps, if Jose Padila had big boobs, Americans would pay attention.