"UK Expat: "Frankly, I consider it more worrying that we do not have a principled press corpse..."

They all act like such zombies, don't they? The "press corpse," I mean. What a smelly bunch, with their bloated egos, and their rotten sense of balance. The real nail in the coffin is the way they tend to bury good stories instead of fleshing them out."

#### Wow! Very cute.

Hit after hit! Good going!

The thing about Paglia is she inspires some great letters - and some great responses to letters.

Palin was actually coherent and quasi-reasonable on Larry King. What was going on with the Couric interview with all that Putin's head rearing and stuff? Anyway, coherent and quasi-reasonable, but still not VP or prez material.

Luv letter to Camille was luvly.

The idea of Camille reading and contributing to this letter column is intriguing... After her next column I'll read the pro letters with that in mind. (And maybe try composing one!)

But no more for this round! I spent altogether too much of yesterday wallowing, and already a precious bit of today. Got get outta the PJs and the basement, dammit! There's a whole (now slightly less scary post-Bush) world out there!

IMO the choosing of Palin for VP candidate was an insult to the electorate, and particularly to the middle-aged middle-class women you refer to, to whom she was offered as a sop, a supposed substitute for the intelligent, hardworking women in politics (and of course particularly a supposed substitute for Clinton). Don't see why it's so hard to figure out...

It was Palin stirring up the mob with her 'oratory' about stupid stuff ("not like us, Ayers, terrorists"), whereas the reaction against her is based on her flubs.

Oh, projection projection... I keep forgetting and trying to argue against it...

Vietnam then seems much like Iraq now - yeah, awful things were going on there, but the U.S. invasions didn't fix them...and, rather, had the Americans also doing awful things. If we could invade and fix everything up, well then okay, I guess - we sort of did that, after a fashion, in Germany and Japan in WW2. Maybe we thought we were gonna do the same thing again... I fear for Afghanistan, which has mired down invaders for centuries, and I don't think we're going to do any better.

...when Obama answered the question about what his educated, accomplished etc. wife would do rattling around in the White House. I think he should have deferred to her there. (OTOH that was an unnecessary little put-down by her about "what part of dishwashing do you like"). I thought the football thing at the end was stupid (and rude - people here are making the best of it as not the non-sexist moment it looked like to me). Owell, it *humanizes* powerful people to yammer on about sports with them.

Details, details. On the whole, they were a lovely couple. Imagine John McCain & Cindy there, or (shudder, reach for the bottle) Sarah and Todd Palin.

But Michelle has given up her career (at least for now) not to be mother to her children (she talked about juggling that with work, plus her mother's help) - she's given it up in deference to her husband. It isn't that she's stopped her high-power career to be full-time mother, but to be wifey. (Maybe she'll have a second career later on a la Hilary - hope so.)

of the time (long ago) when my (then) husband remarked that black women have great behinds. I said, "So do black men." And he said, "They do? And you NOTiced?"

isn't there some white woman, name of Kardashian I think, famous for one thing and one thing only, and that's her protuberant backside. P.S. - That url for the author brought up a bunch of pix, but none of her rear-end. I want my money back.

read a biog of Rand and her romantic relationships.

Thing about ultra-rationalists is that they don't seem to notice how irrational they are.

Not that we Subjectivists are doing a whole lot better...

(Someone should do a dissertation sometime on our 'handles'.)

Your mini-essay on Rand was great! The Rand characters are robots, missing a lot of the messy but essential human stuff. Romanticized psychopaths.

Yeah - in fact he has come across as a hawk on Afghanistan (which has bogged down all previous invaders, and will do the same to the U.S.) (Though I acknowledge the perceived need to get and, in BO's words, KILL Bin Ladin...) (No, I have no solution to the conflicting problems of avoiding Afghanistan-bogging-down and getting BL. So far nobody else seems to either...)

is pre-human. In the animal world, males will mount other males to demonstrate dominance. In many species, particularly herd species, a male will dominate all the females and all the other males (if any other adult males are allowed to hang around). (Patriarchy damages most men as well as all women.)

That doesn't mean it's inevitable. Human beings are quite plastic. We also have innate antagonism towards The Other, innate inclination towards war, a natural impulse to rob, trample, prevail by any means necessary. However, childhood training, 'artificial' cultural standards and the rule of law keeps most of this in check. Even wife-beating is no longer acceptable, even if there haven't been many steps to counter-act it.

We also, as mammals, have as Rodriguez says, the mother-bond, and also, as herd animals, we have innate love, empathy and cooperation to draw on. Human history has been a struggle between the dichotomies of our nature, but in the long run, and at least in our own cultures, the "better angels of our nature" are prevailing. Proposition 8 was an unpleasant bump in the road, but heart and neo-cortex seem on the whole to be gathering momentum vis-a-vis the ancient primitive impulses...

Of course, economic hard times tends to move the culturally-progressive clock back...