I feel like I'm going crazy reading quotes from Michelle Malkin, Bill O, Rush Limbaugh, Jonah G, Glenn B, et al. How do these people get air time? Who listens to them? Who could possibly believe them? How is it possible that any rational person could correlate a non-violent peace group with the Nazis?

Sweet denial is failing me. Are we really growing more ignorant, violent, irrational and hard right proto-fascist all the time? How could there be so much support for this? This can't be just 9/11 fear.

Please tell me I'm wrong.

In 2007 a black man is a serious contender for the Democratic Nomination.

There's one piece of good news.

Somehow because more socially liberal ideas can be found in American Entertainment--TV, movies, etc...right wingers think the left control the media. It couldn't be further from the truth.

This TT strip was right on. In fact, Joe Lieberman is the perfect example of a "non-partisan liberal" that is, a liberal who walks like, talks like, thinks like (and ocassionally kisses) the right wing.

I got here three months ago and I'm still trying to--wait, typing, swerving, bicycle goddammit!-- find a spot. My advice: Pave.

Central Parking Lot.

If there is one thing the right wing know how to do well it's rally round the flag. They are so united in their hatred of democrats (and moderates) that on election day the entire extended family from anti-gay christjackers to the anti-tax elites will vote for whomever the party has put forward. Giuliani with Romney as VP would be a smart compromise.

It's this team mentality that has helped the right win more elections from schoolboard to U.S. President. The left fails because we are never united, which is the only way to win as long as we keep the electoral college.

"For one thing, the idea of setting an action-thriller against terrorist activity that's all too close to real-life events is simply opportunistic and creepy."

The letter writer makes a good point. I don't believe recent or distant history to be sacrosanct. As far as I'm concerned, the news reports we recieve about the events as they happen may be nearly as biased and full of omissions as the movie treatments that follow.

That said, I'm amazed at our cultural amnesia toward, or reluctance to awknowledge that 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were from Saudia Arabia, our good friends and allies. It would be interesting to know how many of the 7000 princes give a nudge and a wink to Al Qaeda relatives or even cut them an ocassional check.

because on Halloween I give out candy stuffed Magnums.

I'll take a rosy, myopic, spacey philosopher's disconnected musings over empiracal data any day. And he's also right about technology coming to save us at the last moment--just when the ecological niches around the globe are beginning to collapse, when ocean levels rise to flood the basements of the Lower East Side, and countries are waging desperate wars over the last 10 million barrels of oil---the smarty pants MIT types will come up with a mircale thingie (poop powered hover trucks? rad new phones?) to save us.

And that "thingie" may even be, as Stephen Hawking suggests, colonizing other planets. How cool would that be. Hello, Oort Cloud. I call top bunk in the terraform barracks on Zoltron 7.

Oh you liberal salonsters and salonstrixes fretting, writing in your cloth bound journals "I gave up plastic water bottles today, but I'm still worried, what will happen to independent films with great hair if everyone is without oil, stranded, starving, spooing the goop from each others' skulls?"

Your first problem is your living in the present, and you have no faith in an Anglo-Christian God that is so mysterious and powerful he's playing it cool by not revealing himself yesterday, today or tomorrow.

Trust Dyson, the Back the Future Professor of 2007, between God, miracle technologies and the Market, things are going to be just fine.

Besides, the future (three years) is a long long ways away.

because he's no threat to real power. Bush power, corporate power, war power,

Halliburton power, Fox power, Murdoch power, white power. He's the bizarro world Johnny Cash. Phony populist. He should do a live show on behalf of convicted Republicans from some white collar prison golf course.

And the cultural lockdown after 9/11 has been good to Rush. Except for the fact that fatboy and the right wing are scared. Scared of soldiers who think. Scared of MoveOn. Scared of free speech. Pretty much scared of the Constitution minus the 2nd Amendment.

Let's face it, we are a little bit sucker for (temporarily!) losing our country to a bunch of bloated crybabies

Rudy, are you auditioning to write for the Daily Show?

You are a parody of yourself.

Let me know because no matter how much of a bastard Ahmadinejad is,

I feel like I'm watching an extended pre-game show for more Shock and Awe--

and everyone is playing their part perfectly.

when his paycheck depends on him not telling the truth.

It'd be easier to find the places in American capitalist life that aren't obsessed with sex and drinking--I'd say PBS and the National Park system.

A black man's guide the least dangerous members of the KKK?