Don't talk about what you can or can't, or will or won't, spend on your pet's medical condition. And certainly don't do it in Salon's letters section. Believe me, it's a no-win situation.

donating the money to a veterans' group. (If anyone has any suggestions, please feel free to let me know.)

If I do that, I'm going to send a copy of that check, along with a letter to the President, telling him that I chose to do this because his administration couldn't see fit to do it themselves.

Olbermann just called the comment inappropriate and indefensible. Suck it, Elephantman.

Sure. Because no parent, and most certainly not Hillary Clinton, has the right to be angry about someone making such a wildly inappropriate comment about their relationship with their adult daughter. Why, that would be just outrageous!

Cloture has passed, 69-29. The fat lady will be singing soon.

Elephantman, where does security stop and the rights of people begin in the minds of you and other "loyal Republicans"? (I would address them by name, but there don't appear to be any others here.) Is anything and everything acceptable in the name of "security"? If not, please tell us what isn't acceptable, and why, and please be specific.

I'm glad that Elephantman knows what genuine privacy is, so that he can weed out all those who have had their imaginary privacy violated.

...here in Tennessee (The Elephant Sanctuary) that takes in old elephants who have spent years in zoos or performing in circuses. Perhaps they will be so kind as to take in our very own Elephantman. And the best thing about the sanctuary is that, once they arrive there, no one is permitted to see them anymore. It sounds like a win-win to me.

Yes, that is the real heart of the matter.

I think it shows a tremendous lack of imagination and a real failure of intellect to get to the point where you see fighting the "war on terror" and protecting the Consitutional rights of this nation's citizens as being irreconcilable, and that one of those things has to go.

It doesn't have to be one or the other. I thought we were so much better than that.

This might be true if "the debt" was something that just sat around, waiting to be paid off. But I don't think that's how it works. "The debt" affects so many other aspects of the economy - inflation, the ability to obtain credit, the number of jobs available, etc. - all of which certainly affect the "lower half of the income scale". Your analysis is embarassingly simplistic.

As far as "sharing the love" with Bush...

For $600? Are you kidding me?

I had something intelligent and pithy all ready to go, and then I watched that video clip from 1985. Jesus, I'm so embarrassed that the 80's was "my" decade! Clearly, anyone who ever sported a mullet is not fit to be a serious journalist. :-)

The above taken from Glenn's second update, which contains a portion of an interview with Mike McConnell on NPR. You just know that when an answer starts out like that, it's going to be followed by a series of outright lies. But, to actually get a nugget of truth - now that's something!

McConnell: However, that's not the real issue. The issue is liability protection for the private sector.

I'm pretty sure that, to most people with at least half a brain, hearing that that is the real issue has got to be rather illuminating.

Or, since I live in the Central Time Zone, do I have an extra hour to down a few more cosmopolitans before I get blown up?

DCLaw must be a member of the WGA, and just had to let out some the creativity that got bottled up during the strike. Anyway, it was much appreciated.

I'll miss all of you. I have learned a lot here, and had some laughs. I have a feeling this is going to be even worse than Y2K.

So long.

A walk around the neighborhood this morning seems to indicate that the terrorists have mostly left us alone. I can only surmise that they have a strong aversion to country music, Nudie suits, chess pie and sweet tea.

Pardon me if this is a dumb question.

But, do they really want the ability to spy on everyone, or do they just want to keep it secret enough so that nobody knows anything, and we, as Covert1963 says, end up policing ourselves?

Of course, even trying to test the system to see if it's the latter has tremendous risks, so it's basically a self-perpetuating thing. They won't even really have to do anything to keep us in line.

No matter which it is, I guess they're pretty close to achieving their dream.

I work for an organization that has a large database of members. The information that is in this database is information that was voluntarily supplied to us, and includes things like name, address, gender, race, birthdate, social security number and, in some cases, political party affiliation.

According to Shooter, if the government reads the private e-mails of our members and listens in on their private telephone conversations - information that they are not voluntarily supplying - this would be OK, because they are already in a database.

Am I understanding that correctly?

And I was not moved by "There Will Be Blood", nor by Daniel Day-Lewis' performance. I can understand that the story was full of archetypes and "larger than life" characters, motivations and events. However, I think that those are better handled in literature than in film, unless the film is satire.

It pains me to say it. I always look forward to a film with Daniel Day-Lewis in it, and I do believe I have seen them all (even "Eversmile, New Jersey"), but this one just wasn't something that made me understand the human condition any better. I look forward to his next film.