The other day I heard (on NPR, natch) some GOP senator making the same wisecrack about health care. "If you like standing in line at the DMV, you'll love nationalized health care," or words to that effect.

Idiot senators must not live in the real world. I'll take my DMV over my insurance company any day of the week.

"In America at that time, there was really nothing in between your Sam Goody chain store and the tiny mom-and-pop."

Maybe you meant to write "In New York at that time..." because there certainly were other big and beautiful record stores elsewhere in the country. (And I don't know that the Sam Goody chain ever moved out of the NY area -- did it?)

If memory serves, by the mid-70s, Georgia's Peachtree Records had spread across the south and as far as California, at the same time that Tower Records was moving east (from California, no?). The competition between the two made for some lively local record scenes.

And some the the mom-and-pop's were hardly tiny: Ann Arbor's Schoolkids Records grew big enough to start a local chain and spawn an progressive record label. The chain is gone, the store (or 99% of it) is gone too, but I think the record label is still around.

For:

"The New York Times Wen's called his remarks...."

read:

"The New York Times called Wen's remarks...."

After falling out of the formerly "key 25-to-49 demographic" a couple years ago, it feels so great to suddenly be part of the newly "key 25-to-54 demographic." Yes, I'm relevant again, for two more years!

But I wonder how many of the 3 million Beck fans are actually part of the somewhat-less-than-key "49-to-54 demographic."

And when the Beck fan club ages again (as we all do), will we be reading about the "key 25-to-59 demographic"?

(In an unrelated note, since no one else has brought it up: isn't Glenn Beck a dead ringer for the psycho conservative senator in the first X-Men movie, the one who gets turned into a water mutant and melts away?)

Anybody who spends more than half a second looking at the numbers -- and who knows what numbers mean -- will immediately understand that the AIG bonus "outrage" is utterly inconsequential in strictly financial terms. Hundreds of millions, hundreds of billions -- what's the difference! Well, a factor of 1000 is the difference. $160 million is about 0.09% of the AIG bailout money -- not enough to spend any time worrying about, if you're an accountant and your main preoccupation is curing the overall economy.

But like the car execs' private jets to DC, it is terrible political theater. Geithner's crime is that he was hired to do one job (fix the economy) but the 24-hour scream machine that is cable news wants him to do another, barely compatible job (manage appearances).

GOP senators rely on this stunt repeatedly when it comes to the budget. Out of 400 billion in spending, they find the 1.5 million dedicated to eliminating pig farm odor, and they try to make that the entire bill and the focus of all political talk. The fact that "earmarks" make up about 1.8% of the budget is irrelevant, because people hear "million" and "billion" (or even "trillion") and don't know the difference.

Oh, if only the American people were even moderately number-literate!

I've known for years and years that the word "robot" was invented by the Czech playwright Karel Čapek in his 1921 play "R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots)," but (like most people, I suspect) I had never seen or read the play... until a couple of days ago.

If you're wondering about the origins of the new BSG (especially if you have seen the old BSG and are aware of the differences between the two), R.U.R. is your answer. I'm actually amazed that no one has brought it up before, at least not on the Salon comment pages.

Robots that look just like people: check. People who insist that robots are just machines and have no souls: check. Robots who rebel and massacre all the humans: check. Robots unable to reproduce: check. And (looking forward to the finale of the new BSG) the final survivors recreating Eden as a new Adam and Eve: check.

So check it out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R._(Rossum's_Universal_Robots) (Wikipedia article on R.U.R.)

http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/c/capek/karel/rur/ (the play itself, in English translation)

...the best government money can buy!

"The experiences of Juanita and Chris... raise questions about a subject of no small importance, and it's not one you're likely to read about in your daily paper."

Pretty soon we're not likely to read anything about anything in the daily paper, not in southeast Michigan anyway. The Detroit papers have just gone to a 3-day-a-week schedule, and my own local paper has announced that it's going to call it quits in July. There's a few hundred more people on the local unemployment lines, right there.