keep up the good work.

look out woodward and bernstein!

do i hear pulitzer?

dilligently with its ear to the ground listening for "what the Republicans might say"

Thank god for your public service offering an alternative to the right wing corporate media. Yes you repeat everything the other brain dead pundits say, but you add "I'm concerned that.." in front of it! Totally different! Alternative!

You really should just change the name of this site to ConcernTroll.com

While you COULD be right, Alex, you could also be wrong. Lets wait to see if Obama ACTUALLY screws up before we jump all over his case for it, ok? thx.

Please don't degenerate into network-like filler news of no real merit. If you've got nothing to post, post nothing.

Yes, it does SOUND ostentatious. I am hoping it is reminscent of the pillars at Monticello, or maybe a classical reference to that early democracy - Athens. Still ostentatious? Yeah, probably. I just want this to work soooooooooo bad.

Saying we can't stand 4 more years is happening a lot at the DNC, but really - can we?

Do you think when Hillary called Michelle and there was no answer she left a message about how she thought the stage should be decorated, recommending against columns, and Michelle accidentally deleted the message before listening to it and now Obama's going to lose the election because the GOP and Salon think Greek columns are tacky and they're going to run ads about it -- well, not real paid-for ads, but video productions tossed into the "news" mix so they don't have to pay a dime of actual advertising?

Come on, Alex, find out for us!!!

Greek columns...that's so overdone.

I'll bet they're faux bare marble, too- instead of the original condition of Greek columns, painted in color with mural scenes.

Something by Jan Sawka would have been better.

Uhh..the White House has columns as well. Quit being so alarmist! Being in constant fear of what horrible and scary thing the McCain might say is not a great way to live. Obama and friends will deal with it.

People are getting sick of this stuff.

Looks more like the White House to me.

What is the big deal? All of Washington is filled with Greek and Roman columns. What's wrong with that?

In a Superman costume.

You really are an awful journalist. Just awful. My first thoughts to your article were reflected in just about every letter already written in reposnse to this trash so I won't go on except to say,-just stop this nonsense already or go work for Drudge.

Where the hell are the stage managers? The Interior Decorators?

COME HELP US QUEER EYE.

*Disclaimer: I'm using high camp here, and am gay myself. DON'T NAIL ME.

While you COULD be right, Alex, you could also be wrong. Lets wait to see if Obama ACTUALLY screws up before we jump all over his case for it, ok? thx.

Please don't degenerate into network-like filler news of no real merit. If you've got nothing to post, post nothing.

Degenerate? You've really got to be kidding. This is nothing new here.

What's interesting is that it's all utter nonsense. I've posted links to a Gallup poll here that showed Obama with a steady six point lead for months. The result? Nothing. No one disuputes it, but the comments return to the "Okay, interesting, so anyway since McCain took the lead, let's figure out why" and cast blame and fight and criticize and troll and etc.

And the articles here are no better. "McCain succesfully turned Obama's popularity against him". Oh yeah? Prove it.

There are daily tracking polls that show a huge lurch every day. Is that one ad? It can't be, unless ads come once a day. Okay, so well, this day's lurch represents the first part of the ad, then the next day it went down because you see, the ad got a little boring in the middle, then...

Anyone who confidently proclaims being able to tie wiggles in opinion polls to a specific ad, or even series of ads, is completely full of it.

But hey, it's a living.

The country runs on accepted wisdom, regurgitated without question. It would be nice if "alternative" magazines didn't. I'm really going to stop using that term for this place though. Someone the other day, by the way, said "Oh Salon, but that's like some women's magazine, right?"

I had to laugh. Wanted to scream though too. Ah well.

If it really is as bad as you describe, then I have to agree that it is a really bad idea.

Wait... how about statues? Will they have statues? I'm imagining the Democratic Pantheon with Roosevelt, JFK, RFK, even Clinton. That'd be great! (no, not really)

I can only hope that they're trying to do some kind of throw-back to the origins of democracy and that it'll be tasteful by the time it's done.

Why bother discussing the differences between the parties or their plans for the future when we can worry about this?

The meeting inside the Obama camp as the poll numbers declined....one advisor says "How about Hillary On The Ticket" and then another---"Shut up with that trivial crap. Let's put columns behind him when he speaks."

Maybe the intention is to recycle some junk props from "the golden days of Hollywood". Cecil B. De Mille was famous for these spectaculars. I think there was a thrilling chariot-racing scene in "Ben-Hur". It would be fiendishly clever to re-enact something like that in a big field.

What was the point of this artilce? Unless they wanted bare stage and scaffolding, they have to decorate it with something. As others have pointed out, columns evoke the White House and ancient Greece, the birthplace of democracy.

Although perhaps it would have been fun to put up a collage of all of McCains houses.

Is this more of "He's just a rock star?"

It seems to me that the whole "rock star" business the McCain campaign keeps nagging about is a cranky old fart's version of "People are really enthusiastic about Senator Obama but they yawn when I show up ... and after I spent 5 years as a POW for them, the ingrate bastards. And now he's giving his acceptance speech in a STADIUM?"

Since none of them can figure out why people would be excited by a candidate who wasn't either white or a POW, they dismiss it as empty celebrity.

Yeah, the "white thing" -- during Vietnam, you could count the number of Brothers who were Naval Officers, let alone Pilots, on the fingers of a double amputee's missing hands -- remember, affirmative action in the officer class, correcting racial bias -- bad in all services, even worse in the Naval Officer and Gentleman -- didn't show up until some time AFTER the Vietnam debacle ended, and then only because Prez Ford wanted to go into Angola but there was a big troublesome question (given the new attention paid to fragging -- the same as happened in WWII to Second Lieutenants, but then it was white guys). The command couldn't be certain if black enlisted men would be willing to take orders from a white officer to fire on black soldiers (as in "they are more loyal to their own than to America").

Frankly, it's getting terribly tired, after all these months hearing the McCain people call Obama "too ambitious," "arrogant," even "Doesn't know his place," and at a certain point you can no longer pretend they're not actually calling him an Uppity N------ . Therefor, if "one of THEM' is getting such an enthusiastic welcome by hundreds of thousands of people, it couldn't be because of the quality of his vision, must be some rapper craze.

Their underlying attitude -- McCain, the Roverer hench-creatures, all of them -- seems to be "You don't want one of THEM to be president, do you?"

That attitude needs to be consigned to the dust-heap of history, along with anyone who is willing to use it for personal gain.