All the liberals who keep saying that our side will crush the fascists are hilarious. When was the last time you picked up a gun, let alone fired one at a target. I won't even bother to ask about shooting at a living animal or human. They have the guns. We don't. They know how to use them. We don't. They have the will to use them. I see no sign our side does. But I plan to learn how to use a gun this year and teach other lefties to do so also. That and get a passport so I can leave.

Liberals helped kill the real antiwar movement. Salon's Michelle Goldberg and others kept red-baiting the real antiwar movement until it split, and the leaders of the split took the movement right into the Kerry campaign, where it dissolved.

Don't blame the movement. Blame yourselves.

"It's difficult, although perhaps not impossible, to imagine anything like the vicious mob mentality of the Chicago Police Department in 1968 happening again."

Unless you went to Seattle in 1999 or Miami in 2004. It's not difficult at all to imagine that happening, since it still does.

"The most obvious danger, for a journalist, is that he or she will respond to criticism by avoiding certain subjects or pulling punches."

I hope you meant this in jest, cuz this is just hilarious. As if any of you "main stream" journalists didn't already do this in order to get published. Steven Colbert said it best:

let's review the rules. Here's how it works. The President makes decisions. He's the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration? You know, fiction!

They'd best be doing it retroactively.

The NFL routinely turns down any political ads trying to buy time during the Superbowl. For years, PETA has tried and failed to get some mildly funny ads on during the game, and I've seen a couple others on the web that were also turned down. The NFL stays away from controversy. This is nothing new.

As the son of an Italian man who worked very hard to assimilate, I can tell you first hand, I feel a deep sense of loss at having little connection to the Italian-American community. I have more understanding of my mother's Irish roots than what it means to be an Italian in America.

Don't not teach your kids what it means to be Black simply because they are biracial. By default, they will become white, not biracial. There is no biracial community. They will grow up not understanding where they come from, and when they go off to college, they will either be one of those who go the whole Black nationalism route to prove their Black heritage or they will completely turn their back on it. Neither is terribly healthy.

The Rageboy blog in no way disproves Ms. Sierra's claims. It is merely another set of assertions. Nor do they directly refute what Ms. Sierra claims.

Intellectually I think that Ms. Sierra's reaction is over the top, but having just myself suffered a month of someone posting my address on Wikipedia and MySpace and then sending it to all 67 counties in Florida and claiming he was politically justified, I can understand the immediacy of the threat she felt. I felt sickened and extremely vulnerable, especially after having been attacked by a mob of right-wing Cubans only five weeks prior. I freaked. Ms. Sierra freaked, and understandably so. Emotions aren't necessarily rational and our responses in crisis situations aren't necessarily rational either.

It is, however, very sadly the point that women are the target of massive misogyny and threats of sexual violence online. A male blogger would be very unlikely to be threatened the same way as Ms. Sierra was. If a man treated a woman in the office the same way he treats a woman online, he'd likely be fired.

"Memory is such an essential part of you, of who you are,"

Actually, memory is entirely who you are.

"I'm sure that there are many, many, many Republicans who are decent, principled people."

Not in my state. I'm from Chicago, and the level of corruption here was simply shocking. Daley and friends are rank amateurs when it comes graft, vote fraud, and dirty underhanded deals. That goes for both parties.

I live in Florida now.

About ten years ago, I was related a similar story about a well known anarchist in Chicago. This was a man who hated communists and communism and had a particular ill will towards Castro.

He was on vacation in Mexico, with a trip to Cuba planned, one presumes so he could see how bad things were under Communist rule and then discuss it back in Chicago. He somehow got his hand smashed on his last day in Mexico. When the doctors learned he was supposed to be going to Cuba the next day, they packed his hand in ice and told him he would get better treatment there . . . and he did . . . and he didn't have to pay for it.

He even got to meet Castro, and went on television thanking the Cuban people for saving his hand, mentioning that back in the United States, he didn't have health insurance, and probably would have lost his hand.

You can't say a bad thing about Castro or Cuba around him now.

You're getting the story 3rd hand. Take it for what it's worth.