My first impulse: From your keyboard to God's monitor!

Second: Yes, let's go after Limbaugh. And let's not stop there. Sean Hannity, (m)Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, Laura Ingraham, Gordon Liddy, Oliver North, Michelle "internment camps" Malkin, and lesser forms of lowlife such as Jason Lewis, Michale Smerconish, and all the local blowhards and blusterers, the purveyors of what the Vanity Fair phrase-turner James Wolcott referred to as "Thud and Blunder".

Third: It's been a long time these wingnut "crybabies have had the airwaves nearly to themselves. Time for them to feel heat. Extreme heat. I like the idea of fear spreading in the right wing community. For far too long, they've thrived on dispensing it, fear in others is nourishment to these sickos. Let them feel some, and may it be well justified.

Fourth: Once things settle down after the Great Talk Radio Purge, let's all grow the hell up as a nation and find better things to do with our time than listen to the pathological rumblings of the delusional right. Read, perhaps? Take a walk along a river, in the sunshine. Get to know someone outside our usual circles. It's only in near-total isolation from the real world that anyone could possibly accept what any of the above-mentioned balloon-juicers utters as even possibly true.

1) Stovetop - use a ridged grill pan, heat it very hot. Place the asparagus on there dry, it will blacken in stripes (you did set it across the ridges?). Turn it once to the opposite side.

Top it very lightly with just a tiny sprinkle of Kosher salt, a drizzle of good balsamic, some citrus zest, and shavings of good Parmesan.

2) Steamed - make an aioli with mayonnaise and a good spicy mustard. Dip the asparagus spears in that. Eat with your fingers - it's good for you!

3) Asparagus and good bacon like each other - render the bacon most of the way, toss in the cut up asparagus, drop in your just shy of al dente fettuccine, add some good Parmesan, a healthy crack of black pepper, a few red pepper flakes, and a drizzle of good olive oil.

And any other way you can think of. Asparagus is your friend.

Living in a neighboring state, with relatives who actually live there, his nonsensical and foolish blather comes as no surprise. It's just his first time on a really large stage, and he's remaining true to form. And he won't be the Republican nominee under any imaginable circumstances anyway. So it's just another dollop of drivel from the CheeseGov ignoramus.

All that said, it's important to raise a point here: There is no such thing as a right to not be offended. We may wish there was. We may pretend there is. There is not. And I hope such a thing is never codified - it would be the death knell of free speech anywhere. Either that, or there would be some ludicrous "threshold" established (statistically?) beyond which someone's beliefs were deemed "too marginal" to matter.

It's far, far easier to turn away, or denounce, than it would be to regain the right to speak freely once we surrender it in the name of inoffensiveness. Freedom of expression is messy, and I'd approach the close with a relevant line from an old Irish pub song: "If you don't like me, then leave me alone!"

Thompson deserves obscurity. My best guess is it's coming soon.

Karl Rove was asked Wednesday whose idea it was to start a preemptive war on Iraq. His answer: "I think it was Osama bin Laden's."

Whose idea was it to start a war on the US Constitution and the American people? I think it was Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and George Bush.

It doesn't matter how low anyone sets the bar. Bush and the current incarnation of the Republican Party (old Honest Abe must be doing about 3000 RPM right now) will find ways to crawl under it.

Well, Truman isn't using it any longer...

...it is that health care - for everyone - needs to be seen in the US as a basic human right, and not a revenue center for insurance carriers, who routinely raise the costs of coverage while actively seeking to deny payment for any reason imaginable.

And this holds true for men, women, and children nationwide. It is inherently unhealthy to be any sort of human being in the 21st Century United States. That must change.

What was needed was a piece of pure fantasy. Suddenly there sprang into his mind, ready-made as it were, the image of a certain Comrade Ogilvy, who had recently died in battle, in heroic circumstances. There were occasions when Big Brother devoted his Order for the Day to commemorating some humble, rank-and-file Party member whose life and death he held up as an example worthy to be followed. Today he should commemorate Comrade Ogilvy. It was true that there was no such person as Comrade Ogilvy, but a few lines of print and a couple of faked photographs would soon bring him into existence.

Tillman and Lynch were the Comrades Ogilvy of Bush's "War on Terror", until they no longer fit the profiles. How utterly inconvenient for our doubleplusgood duckspeakers - they used real people, and real people in incidents with witnesses, no less.