""waiting to get the votes" before taking any of the decisive actions mentioned are either delusional or advocating anarchy."

Wrong!

This isn't about the power to remove Bush from office, it's about the politics of taking a clear position. The Democratic Party needs, really really needs to demonstrate some strength of character. Putting up articles of impeachment would do quite nicely.

Anarchy? Do you really think America is on the verge of a complete collapse of social structure? Do you think everything would fall apart that easily, just because the House presented a bill of impeachment?

IMO, *that* is far nuttier then anything discussed here.

The article hardly demonstrated any great win for Microsoft. They're dumping Windows there ( undisclosed discount pricing == dumping ) which proves that the free market in operating systems was a fantasy all along. It's a command and control market, not at all free.

China shows no interest in becoming dependent on imports. They're more savvy then to become dependent on Microsoft. Look for pirated hacks and other interesting variations on the core O/S. Heck, they might even fix a few bugs by hacking the binaries. ( unlikely, but a funny idea :)

Microsoft and the Chinese government are meant for each other, they think alike. And Linux doesn't need "Red Flag Linux" in the public mindset, reinforcing false notions of open source being socialist.

The whole O/S war is old. Linux has won. Windows isn't going away, it's just irrelevant. The Microsoft stranglehold is broken.

Good riddance.

Only for the letters she inspires. Oh sure, I detest her silly nonsense too, but for those of us who appreciate a good insult there's always at least a half dozen good insults following every Paglia column. She's great fun to mock, so I applaud Joan's decision to keep paying her.

Camille Paglia; Salon's Punching Bag. ( filled with straw, you see :)

Thanks Glenn.

It was 1998, and Salon's Joe Conason was one of the few sane voices covering the Clinton witch hunts. The Liberal Media shibboleth was everywhere, to suggest otherwise was to invite ridicule.

Against those who complained about the Liberal Media I would argue; "Journalists may be a bit liberal, but Big Media owners are Republican conservatives. Since Ford trucks are made by union members, are they Union trucks? The boss has more say then the line workers."

But it was no use. The noise machine has powerful voodoo and can bamboozle the simple mind. It takes a huge dose of ugly reality to kill a media created zombie, but the final blows are coming from hunters like Glenn.

Thanks again.

( it's finally safe to drop the scare quotes around Liberal Media :)

Darwin only said that evolution improves fitness for the environment.

So on a planet of fundamentalist whack jobs, all organisms would evolve to be like these Senators.

Pity, eh? Wish it meant constant improvement instead.

Paul Dirks made the tired, standard argument that the media only gives us what we want, as if we're the media's customers.

Baloney. Balderdash. Hogwash.

The media's customers are the advertisers. We're the product, and we will watch and listen no matter how stupid the programming, Q.E.D.

"the song was about a guy getting out of prison after all and not a war hero."

Coffee through my nose funny!!

I've long thought of myself as having "low social cohesion factor," evidenced by my desire to run the other way when seeing a mob on the march. I liken social cohesion factor to the attractive Van Der Wahl forces that holds water molecules tightly together, causing surface tension. In my metaphor, surface tension is the resistance you run into when trying to use simple reason to refute widely held foolishness.

Your points helped to clarify my own little theory. It's hard for most people to deal with thoughts that run contrary to the crowd.

OTOH, isn't using "synecdoche" as a verb itself a metonymy? Or is it just a misuse? :)

Excellent post, your work is another good reason to subscribe.

Call for it, make a big noise, and watch the numbers in favor of it go up.

The "we can't do it until we have enough votes" bunch are the ones who don't understand politics. It's not about having the power or waiting for the power, it's about gaining the power.

The way to gain the power is to show people you've got the guts to do it, not to whine about not having enough votes.

I like Dr. Cole's work, but I'm disappointed that he's joining the chorus of "be scared, be very scared."

Dirty bombs, hijacked airplanes, suicide bombers at shopping malls, none of these things scare me. Our country has faced far greater threats with courage.

35,000 Americans die each year from ordinary traffic fatalities, from something we do to ourselves. None of these boogie-man threats could come close to that number. And if they ever did, America would *really* go to war.

"They are, yes, a little hurt that the United States is solving its problems with violence."

Care to give us an example of a real American problem being solved with real American violence?

What an asinine thing to write.

Romney sez:"She said we have been an 'on-your-own society.' She said, 'It's time to get rid of that and replace it with shared responsibility.' That's out with Adam Smith and in with Karl Marx,"

But Adam Smith said: "All for ourselves and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind."

Romney's even lying about his own father of conservatism.

It's going where the rest of the country has been going for years, to a place where financial success and the comfort and status it brings is much more important then suffering for principles.