... is because there is no draft.

It's a combination of a) apathy towards the plight of economically underprivileged people who have fewer options for income than the middle class, and b) a somewhat more defensible recognition that nobody who has enlisted in the armed services since 2003 can claim they didn't know what they were getting into. If that's their choice, so be it.

I'm not necessarily defending either of these, but I think b) is more easily argued.

As a Gen X-er, I've usually rolled my eyes at all forms of street protest. Maybe in the '60s they were fresh and new and got the public's attention. But for everyone in my and later generations, it's been clear that they're much more about getting attention for oneself. It just feeds the narcissism of the boomer generation.

Contemporary protesters do almost make a mockery of the causes they claim to support; no one takes them seriously, including me, even when I'm sympathetic to their cause. Unfortunately, it's all about money these days. The left needs to invest in the resources to buy a few more Congressmen/women.

Although I agree that factions of the left and right can indeed be strange bedfellows when it comes to Constitutional issues, I'm not inclined to believe or trust much that Barr says or does.

I'm not saying that this changes much one way or the other, but for the record, Barr:

- Authored and sponsored the Defense of Marriage Act.

- Was a longtime supporter of the "war on drugs".

- Was a zealous advocate of Bill Clinton's impeachment.

- Voted for the Iraq War.

- Reinvented himself as a libertarian only after he was defeated in a 2002 reelection bid for his House seat.

Regardless of what he's saying now, that's not exactly the track record of someone who's been consistently libertarian or free-thinking.

By all means, let's make use of Barr in his new incarnation. But it's a fair reading of his career to say that he's little more than just another opportunistic politician.

I've often wondered if there were some sort of payola going on in the business of film criticism given the way terrible films get good reviews.

Case in point: "Wanted". I don't know if Stephanie reviewed it, but the majority of critics (even many high-profile ones) gave that film good reviews, and in my humble opinion, it's a symbol of everything that's wrong with contemporary filmmaking. It's nothing more than the most banal, unexamined male fantasy wrapped up in some mumbo-jumbo about a secret society with the most bizarre-looking, anorexic, collagen-lipped "sex symbol" imaginable in Angelina Jolie. Its longing for an unaccountable authority supported by horrific violence is little short of fascism on film. Siegfried Kracauer would've had a lot to say about it.

In all seriousness, where is the redemptive intelligence, the transcendent pathos in that story? And why did the overwhelming majority of critics endorse it?

Whenever I watch films either from the Hollywood studio era, postwar Europe, or even American films of the '60s and '70s, I'm thunderstruck by their literate quality, their wit, or their humanism. Those qualities have waned drastically in the past 20 years, and what we're left with is puerile adolescence, fawned over by critics. Why should adults patronize this junk?

You wrote:

"But Kilgore's main argument (it seems to me) is that right now, the only thing the Dems can really do is prevent bills from getting passed. They cannot, however, get anything accomplished that way. The only way for the Dems to be able to *do* anything is for the president to be Democratic."

This is factually incorrect and misleading. The Dems control Congress. They control the agenda and what bills get voted on or not. How can you argue that a majority can only "prevent bills from getting passed"?

If the Democratic leadership actually stood for anything, they could wreak havoc on what's left of Bush's image in all kinds of ways (setting timetables for withdrawal from Iraq, requiring him to obtain Congressional approval before bombing Iran, aggressively investigating his administration's cronyism, etc.). Moreover, they could simply set aside things like the hideous "FISA compromise".

The fact is: they choose not only to not act as progressives, but to enable the worst aspects of Bush's proto-totalitarianism. They are as dangerous to the rule of law, if not more so, than many Bush-loving Republicans.

Tempting as it is to blame everything bad on Bush, the fact is that plenty of so-called salt-of-the-earth "average Americans" were perfectly willing to forgo common sense during the real estate boom and believe whatever lying banks were telling them about how large a house they could afford.

Yes, of course, the political/economic establishment should take a large share of the blame, but I'm not willing to let my fellow citizens off the hook. Many of them behaved foolishly, buying homes much larger and more luxurious than they could rationally afford. They took out adjustable-rate mortgages when interest rates were at historic lows, when the only direction they could go was up, and then these same people wonder why their McMansion is suddenly bleeding them dry? Get a grip, people.

To use a politically incorrect, though pithy, phrase: you can't rape the willing. Many Americans spread their legs as wide as possible for years on end, and yet they're incredibly surprised that they ended up with an STD.

So this is ending as it always does: responsible citizens and taxpayers get to pay to clean up for both elite greed and mass public stupidity.