Intead of being a coward and putting your fingers in your ears why don't you try listening to your readers and responding to their very valid criticisms of your resident idiot.

James Margaris

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Oh heavens no don't take the delightfully nutty Camille away! Where would we go to read such trenchant letter writing in response to her nonsense!? I don't even bother reading her stuff anymore, I just go straight to the letters. Someone ought to gather them into a book.

i>News coverage is just another form to content to drive ad impressions and revenue, no different from Lost or America's Next Top Model.

-- cestmoi123>

Joan Baez wrote a song in the 1970's called "Time Rag" about being interviewed by a Time Mag reporter. Here he's asking her about Dylan, and then the bridge:

Then suddenly it stopped and he started to lobby

Said, Tell me some inside stuff about Bobby

Bobby who? I smiled and said

And the TIME man's face was laced with red

I know you guys used to know each other

I know you refer to him as being your brother

And I know that you know where he's coming from

I said, You know alot for being so Goddamned dumb

And I said, TIME, TIME mag, mag

You got me on the rag, rag

Take your insults about the queen

And shove them up your royal Timese machine

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Nothing's changed.

I despise the ceaseless, obnoxious, blathering, intrusive, mindless television. People have a more profound emotional and psychological relationship with images on a screen than they do with the people to whom they're related sitting next to them on the sofa. I haven't watched the stupid thing for seven years and will not sit long in a room that has one on. The quicker we can blow it up the better.

I've lived long enough to have the music I grew up with (the Beatles, Motown, Atlantic artists, Dave Clark Five, The Monkies, Elvis, James Taylor, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, plus all the other pop stuff of the 60's and 70's) to just depress the hell out of me when I often hear it now. (Especially The Beatles and James Taylor) When it's connected to a product or a service it not only depresses me it cheapens the music and its personal meanings for me. I can't say exactly why it puts me in a funk, perhaps because it's from another time and place and often has a association with people and relationships that no longer exist.

On another note, why do people assume that you want to listen to their ugly music while "your party is being contacted" when you call on a cellphone? I always hold the phone away from my ear until I can make out that something relevant is going on on the other end.

The neocons, both in and outside the military, believe the U.S. lost Vietnam because the military didn't control the flow of information to the U.S. public. They aren't about to let that happen in Iraq.

Yes, it's sexism. All of it. The "b" word, the Campbell baloney and the student's dumb question. All of it coming from women, smart women. Women are so sexist. I still don't trust Senator Clinton to make any meaningful changes in the status quo.

The only good film adaptation of a Marquez story was "The Tale of Innocent Erendira and Her Evil Grandmother". Irene Papas played the grandmother. It wasn't made my americans of course. Every time somebody takes up the challenge to set one of Marquez's fabulous tales to film, I cringe. I can only pray that it isn't an American director and crew that try it. Please, I pray, if they have to put it on film, let it be Latin American or European producers/directors, even an Asian one would do better than an American would.

These things are not real debates. They're public soliloquies served up to entertain, not inform. It's about jokes and clever responses and personal attacks and who's the best at one-uping the other. It's television. It's even bad television which is why most people would rather watch infomercials instead. There is no such thing as a journalist on TV anymore, they're all entertainers. So are the politicians. It's American presidential politics so it's a popularity contest based on hair and style, not on what the issues are and what the candidates are proposing to do about them and what that would mean.

ER: "Pelosi, Clinton, Feinstein, Boxer, Eshoo, Lofgren, etc: all the "great" women who were going to do things differently have simply and continuously voted for the crap that I hate: Torture. War. Domestic spying."

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History has repeatedly shown that women in positions of power, like men, will vote their class and not their gender, every time. The feminist ideal that everything would be different if only women ruled is a fantasy with no merit in reality whatsoever. History says otherwise. Women are just like men when it comes to power, money and privilege. That isn't a reason NOT to vote for them, but if you vote for a woman believing that she's somehow going be more compassionate, more understanding, less war mongering, more interested in the personal well being and happiness of everyday citizens, simply because she's a woman, you're a fool.