Okay, it's not really critical in the Grand Scheme, not about rescuing the ozone layer, the whales, the democratic system, or even the films of Henry Jaglom from undeserved obscurity. Just another (yawn) teenaged prodigy, this one headlong for the abyss and, I mean, like, whatever...

Ah, Michelle, what the FUCK have they done to you?

Here's this kid with a gift. Like any kid in such a fix, Michelle Wie needed special care. She may be precocious in other ways, too, of course, although her unfamiliarity with the English language ("I thought I putted awesome") raises reasonable doubt concerning her academic qualifications for Stanford. Never mind. She can hit a golf ball farther and straighter than nearly any other woman professional (and quite a few men, as well).

This ability has led those in charge to turn her into a franchise. Her endorsement contract with Nike, alone, is worth millions. She is marketing her own golf apparel.

But she has not won a tournament. And now, not even eighteen, she is self-destructing in full public view. At first it was an injury to her wrist. This rapidly turned into a series of withdrawals in the middle of competition, along with a relentlessly false cheerfulness and a self-assessment bordering on hallucination. It is not so easy being a franchise after all.

Once she must have been young, excited at her talent and in love with a great game. She is not in love anymore. She is in pain, and trapped by the machine, by expectations, by all the money and fame.

Children are not for capitalizing on. Today was the first day of the U.S. Women's Open. Michelle finished 12 over par, behind nearly the entire field. Tomorrow may be worse. Beneath the forced smiles and bland statements to the press is a breakdown of tragic proportion. It is a horror to watch.

Got this email today on the “immigration” issue. As we know, there’re folks flaming out all over the place about “illegal alients,” by which is meant Mexicans and others from the southern hemisphere.

What’s so disturbing about these occasional internet letters is their barely-concealed meanness. There’s a kind of hysterical AHA! to them, as though the speaker has been tamping down some serious rage for a long time and now – now! – it’s okay to let it out.

By the way, how come these guys always capitalize everything?

>> THERE WILL BE NO SPECIAL BILINGUAL PROGRAMS IN THE SCHOOLS..
>> ***
>> THERE WILL BE NO SPECIAL BALLOTS FOR ELECTIONS.
>> ******
>> ALL GOVERNMENT BUSINESS WILL BE CONDUCTED IN OUR LANGUAGE.
>> ***
>> FOREIGNERS WILL NOT HAVE THE RIGHT TO VOTE NO MATTER HOW LONG THEY ARE HERE.
>> ***
>> FOREIGNERS WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO HOLD POLITICAL OFFICE.
>> ****
>> FOREIGNERS WILL NOT BE A BURDEN TO THE TAXPAYERS.
>> ****
>> NO WELFARE, NO FOOD STAMPS, NO HEALTH CARE OR OTHER GOVERNMENT ASSISTANCE PROGRAMS.
>> *****
>> FOREIGNERS CAN INVEST IN THIS COUNTRY BUT IT MUST BE AN AMOUNT EQUAL TO 40,000 TIMES THE DAILY MINIMUM WAGE.
>> *****
>> IF FOREIGNERS DO COME AND WANT TO BUY LAND, THAT WILL BE OKAY. BUT OPTIONS WILL BE RESTRICTED.......... YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED WATERFRONT PROPERTY. THAT IS RESERVED FOR CITIZENS NATURALLY BORN INTO THIS COUNTRY.
>> *****
>> FOREIGNERS MAY NOT PROTEST; NO DEMONSTRATIONS; NO WAVING A FOREIGN FLAG; NO POLITICAL ORGANIZING; NO BAD-MOUTHING OUR PRESIDENT OR HIS POLICIES. IF YOU DO, YOU WILL BE SENT HOME.
>> *****
>> IF YOU DO COME TO THIS COUNTRY ILLEGALLY, YOU WILL BE HUNTED DOWN AND SENT STRAIGHT TO JAIL.
>> ****

>> HARSH, YOU SAY?............

>> The above laws happen to be the Immigration Laws of " MEXICO !"
>> How about that for an eye-opener?!!

Yes, how is that for an eye-opener?

Well, we can always adopt the policies and laws of another country, but I thought we were proud of our own.

The thing that gets me about this sort of bilge is that if you apply it to the early settlers along the east coast, not to mention the gringos who took the west from both native Americans and the early spanish conquerors, then NONE of us would be here.

These sorts of diatribes emanate from people who feel a deep, undifferentiated pain about something. Maybe they can't get laid. Maybe they're broke and bought the propaganda of the wealthy and, therefore, blame the "other" people, the "strangers."

Every friend I ever made was a stranger before we met. Poison gets us nowhere. It's one planet, last time I checked. We have photos. Man, this racist, anti-Mexican, anti-Latin strain does not speak well of us as a people.

Just thought I'd mention it.

I’d heard rumors. If you write articles and turn up on radio talk shows babbling about who may or may not have conspired to murder the Kennedys, it attracts a variety of interested people. These people have stories to tell, ranging from the plausible to the man-from-Mars variety. I didn’t run many of them down, having neither the resources nor the inclination. I already knew enough to scare the piss out of me and didn’t need more.

One which fascinated me was this: John Kennedy had been turned on to LSD in the White House by a lover, one Mary Pinchot Meyer. It sounded far-fetched. Turns out it wasn’t.

Among the stunning revelations in David Talbot’s new book, “Brothers”, is that in the early sixties a small group of socially-prominent women in Washington, having taken LSD, decided to systematically turn on as many powerful men as possible as a means of changing the world. Its ringleader was Mary Meyer, wife of a senior CIA official, Cord Meyer. She was also Kennedy’s lover.

She’d told Kennedy about her LSD experiences and he was curious enough to want to try it. They smoked marijuana together (the first time, it took JFK three joints before he felt the effects). By early 1963, they were dropping acid together.

Talbot places this information in a significant historical context. Mary Meyer had determined to use psychedelic drugs as a means of changing the consciousness of the most powerful men in Washington. She enlisted seven other socially-prominent women. Together, they were getting to the center of power. But what she did not know was that her good friend, James Angleton, one of the highest-ranking officials in the CIA, was tapping her telephone and bugging her residence (she had separated from husband Cord), and the CIA – already facing a threat to its very existence (Kennedy had promised to “smash the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds”) – knew that the President was taking LSD.

We’ll never know to what degree his use of marijuana and LSD, long before they became epidemic among the young, influenced Kennedy’s policies, but the record is clear that from late 1962 until his death he moved dramatically away from the Cold War and toward peace.

Had he not been murdered, there would have been no Viet Nam War. On November 22, 1963, there were fewer than 16,000 U.S. “advisers” there, and but a handful of combat deaths. Kennedy’s last executive order had begun the withdrawal he told J. William Fulbright and other Senators would be completed after his re-election. He had also opened a backchannel communication with Fidel Castro and planned to normalize relations with Cuba. He initiated the first arms agreement, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, eliminating the appearance of Strontium-90 in milk. In June of 1963, he gave the greatest speech of his presidency, at American University, where he firmly rejected “a Pax Americana, imposed on the world by American weapons of war,” and noted that “we all inhabit this small planet, we all breathe the same air, we all cherish our children’s futures, and we are all mortal.”

It remains a criminal outrage that his murderers were never caught, despite the common knowledge among many in government that elements of that government carried out the killing.

Mary Pinchot Meyer was terrified, she’d told her LSD source, Timothy Leary, in 1963. She’d made a bad mistake. She’d attempted to recruit someone to join her network and the woman had informed others. After Kennedy’s murder, she told a friend, “he was moving too fast.”

Less than a year after Dallas, Mary Meyer was herself murdered while jogging near her home. Two bullets, one to her heart and one to her head, an execution-style killing. The case was never solved. Within thirty minutes of the shooting, however, her friends Toni and Ben Bradlee went to her house to find James Angelton, who had broken in, going through her papers.

What really happens in America, way, way past the headlines, the news stories, the supposed fact of things... what really happens is closer to “The Sopranos” than to horseshit shows like the mis-nomered ‘Hardball’. I think we know it. Europeans are said to consider Americans naîve, but I think it’s something else. We’re just confused and afraid and not up to the kind of task which is required to keep our freedom.

I urge you to read Talbot’s important book.

My first thought was: what a weird computer glitch. Mercury in retrograde, that’s what it is, communications getting garbled, electronica going haywire. These are good words, “garbled” and “haywire,” don’t you think so?

My second thought was: what the fuck is going on?

I started this webLog as a place to toss the periodic screeds and random observations that I would otherwise inflict on a shifting roster of friends, whomever I thought might be interested, using the blind “cc” designation which preserves their identities from one another. I figured I’d write this thing and cut back on the avalanche of junk I’d gotten into the habit of passing on to unwilling receipients.

I’d write these things. One feature of my log is that I’m able to check in to find out how many visitors I’ve had on a given day. There’s a day-by-day list, along with totals, and also a total of pages viewed.

I decided at the beginning not to answer the requests of visitors to be listed as “friends” since it’s not that kind of deal. I am not trying to network, God help me. When I got these emails from rosemary378 or whomever I simply ignored them. I hope that wasn’t rude of me. I don’t know internet protocol. I just wanted to make my log a small outlet and occasional amusement.

So the only way you’re going to read these letters is by subscribing, and that’s kept the visitors, other than the few happening onto it, a small group of actual friends. Visitors have generally numbered around 8 or 10 a day unless there’s a new posting. Then there’d be maybe 20 or 25. The page views are often less than twice that.

Imagine my surprise when one day recently the visitors numbered 14 and the page views came to 414.

That doesn’t seem possible unless a dozen of you were simultaneously so bored that you decided to scroll back through every line I’d written, and that’s a lot of boredom. 414 page views is at least 20 times the average.

Does this make sense to anyone?

*

I promise to return to matters of more general interest shortly.

Your government has now officially approved your being poisoned. My government, too, sorry to say, but facts are facts.

I mention this because I haven’t seen it in the press and I don’t watch television, and I rely on the internet, thank God for it, because occasionally reality escapes the censors and makes it to the electronic free world. My friend Jack Kaplan sent me the story. It’s very long and complex, so I’m not going to reproduce it here or even try to give a comprehensive account, but there are a few salient points.

* In August of 2006, the Food and Drug Administration, the same folks who in other times have brought us thalidomide, and silicon implants, told the corporate “food” producers that it was henceforth okay to use bacterial and fungal acids (crystallized viruses) as “food” additives.

* You can count on consuming these toxins if you eat luncheon meat, cold cuts, sausages, hot dogs, sliced turkey, and chicken. No one knows what the accretion of these poisons will do to the human digestive system, including the liver.

* The use of these acids is designed to kill a bacterium known as Listeria-monocytogenes, which itself is not harmful. This bacterium is actually a biological transformation transformation of spoiled meat. The FDA, which was once established to protect the consumer is now a creature of those industries it is supposed to regulate. It has now made it easier for “food” producers to sell us spoiled meat.

Obviously, we can try to be informed about what we’re eating, and organic foods are still safe, but we’re at best managing to protect ourselves. The broader society, meanwhile, what was once America, is being so significantly compromised that it’s impossible to tell whether it will actually survive.

"Lookingglass" was an easy title to come up with. I started this blog for several reasons, most of them probably neurotic, and I hadn't thought much about what I'd write, if anything. But whatever it turned out to be, it would be one stodgy fellow's opinion living in a time straight out of Lewis Carroll.

I offer as exhibit A, the only one I really need, the announcement that the Department of Justice is conducting an investigation to determine whether its boss, Alberto Gonzalez, committed criminal acts, including felonies such as suborning perjury.

No, this story in The Washington Post was not written by Paul Krassner.

It is no longer necessary to conceal the whitewash behind the newest version of the Warren Commission. Now it's much simpler. The perps investigate themselves and declare themselves innocent. The media is relieved. Not that long ago, the CIA "investigated" its own role in smuggling cocaine into Los Angeles, as two journalists charged in the Mercury News. The reporters were fired. The paper apologized. The agency found itself clean.

In other news, Barry Bonds announced the results of his own intensive inquiry into whether he used steroids. "It turns out I didn't touch the stuff," he said.

Why not? Anything may be possible; anything may be true. We're through the looking glass. Remember?

“We know of his interest in the Kennedy assassination.” That’s what the friendly F.B.I. agent said to a very close friend of mine, maybe nine or ten years ago. The Bureau had, at least at that time, an office in this building on Shaver Street in San Rafael, and the locals liked to drop in on my friend’s business and flirt a little. One day an agent saw a letterhead or something on her desk.

They “kn(e)w of my interest...”

Well, that made us even. I always knew that the F.B.I. had an interest, maybe not in the assassinations which turned America upside down but in the people who expressed curiosity about whether there was a kind of lone nut factory somewhere being run by an offshoot of CoIntelPro, or maybe by some off-the-books spooks who’d either fled or extended the compound, your guess is as good, maybe better, than mine.

Always wondered why. I mean, if the articles I’d written and speeches I’d made on the subject of Dallas were the product of my own paranoid, feverish mind, then so what? That wouldn’t be any crazier than some of the stuff Reagan was saying at the time, and he was the President. Anyhow, I hadn’t done any of that writing or speech-making for a long time. It had just gotten too weary. The evidence, from every possible point of entry, proved that some sort of conspiracy had ordered and carried it out, but after that it was a lot of guessing. So why would the F.B.I. care about me?

The last speech I ever gave on the topic was in 1981. There was a week-long event at U.C. Davis and various speakers on a diverse bunch of topics had been rounded-up. I’d brought with me my usual assortment of show-and-tell items, including the 26 volumes of the Warren Report and Exhibits which the Commission counted on nobody reading – except there’d turned out to be a district attorney in New Orleans who did and that’s when all that trouble started. Maybe I showed the Zapruder film.

After I’d told my jokes about the Magic Bullet – “it entered the President’s back at a downward angle, changed direction and exited his throat... then it noticed Governor Connally over to the right...” – and finished up, there were the questions. There’d always been two I couldn’t answer and they were asked that night. One was: how come Bobby Kennedy had accepted the government’s story? The other was: what do we do about it?

Now, thanks to a fellow named David Talbot, the founder of Salon, we’ve got a pretty good answer to the first one. The record is clear. Robert Kennedy never did accept it, not from the beginning, and for the remainder of his life he was engaged in a private and very determined investigation into what he was sure had been a conspiracy issuing from some of the most powerful offices in America.

Talbot’s new book, “Brothers,” is the pursuit of that question. In a moving Author’s note, he concludes:

“I was a sixteen-year-old campaign volunteer for Robert Kennedy the night he was shot down in Los Angeles. It struck me then that his murder, following those of his brother and Martin Luther King, Jr., had irreparably wounded America. And this feeling has never left me in all the years that have followed. For me, aggressively pursuing the hidden history of the Kennedy years was an attempt to find out where my country had lost its way, and perhaps to restore the hope and faith that I myself had lost as a young American growing up in the 1960s.”

There have been indications lately that something is stirring. The claimed ‘confession’ of E. Howard Hunt; the ‘new’ acoustical evidence of too many shots; the video taken at the Ambassador Hotel on the night of Bobby’s shooting which shows two identified C.I.A. killers among the celebrants; the video clip of the beginning of the Dallas motorcade, where the two Secret Service agents assigned to ride on the right and left rear of the President’s car are suddenly waived off, and their obvious surprise as they stand there, the motorcade proceeding without them. The latter two videos have been seen on YouTube, for God’s sake.

Maybe, somehow, regardless of the nexus of power, the whole thing will just come undone, will spill out, what Jim Garrison called the dark secret at the heart of the American dream. Just knowing there are guys like Talbot running around makes me feel a little less lonely tonight. There are a lot of us “interested,” it seems.

It’s probably a common error. I didn’t realize that high school in America actually lasts forever. I thought that you grew up and got your shit together and took some part in the great Running-Of-Things. I thought that your interests would somehow be elevated, the earlier youthful questions about life taking on a richness with age and experience.

I must’ve been thinking of some other culture.

This is brought home with a vengeance with the front-pageness of one Paris Hilton, who by ALL rational accounts is a thoroughly dim-bulb rich girl convinced of her own significance. I concede I haven’t really kept up with modern American culture. For example, I’ve never seen the video of Paris sucking off someone which, I’m told, made her an even bigger celebrity when it gained...uh...exposure on YouTube or somewhere.

I mean, what is the deal? Who ARE these people? Paris Hilton, the name alone, my God, and some other blonde whacko whose name mercifully escapes me, and then there’s the one who died and the issue of her child’s father being a hotly-debated item out there, in America, where actual life has never gotten out of high school.

See, that’s the thing. America’s really just a very big high school. Most people would rather gossip about who’s sleeping with the Prom Queen than wonder why the administration has keys to all of their lockers. The football team’s having a rough year in Iraq, but while the owners were willing to fire the G.M. they are making no trades.

Just like in high school, we have “fashion” and “society,” who’s “in” and who’s not. And there people who get to decide these things by virtue of their (parents’) wealth, and if they’re big enough to beat you up. The white football hero who rapes the Latina at a party gets a nominal slap on the wrist, has to write an essay about the single wing formation.

Maybe there is a limit. As C.W. Nevius writes in his front-page Chronicle story today, there’s a collective thrill in the jailing of Little Paris, a visceral charge in reading about her weeping and screaming, her “It’s not right!” exclamation, not to mention her calling for her Mommy.

The main jailing offense appears to be that Hilton thinks it’s fine to drive drunk and recklessly, even after they’ve nailed you a couple of times already and your license has been yanked, I mean, what the Hell? If I’m drunk, careening through the streets, then get the fucking pedestrians out of the way! Do you know who I am?

I’d like to believe that the public joy over this re-encarceration means that we’re starting to wise up, but I don’t think it’s so. Part of the lunatic star machine is the making and breaking of people, as though they – Hilton being not only shallow but bonehead dumb – enable the collective society to fill our otherwise mainly vacant lives with totemic dramas upon which we can hang our own unexpressed but very real personal feelings.

Coming soon in this space: a few notions about Michelle Wie and what will become of her.

I was actually on the golf course when I heard about it, because I hadn’t had time to get through the paper this morning on account of having to get to court on a fool’s errand induced by the thugs who run things at Allstate Insurance’s San Francisco lawyers’ office, and hadn’t gotten to Jon Carroll before it was time to go.

You know how it is: there’s Carroll’s column and ... something happens. Rude life interferes, no having that much fun so early in the day, not to mention your mind might be inadvertently stimulated and you’d lose all commercial incentive, and that, after all, is what America means in 2007: facing the world with MONEY on the mind.

Not my story, exactly. I realized quite a while back that although one must figure out the money thing well enough to pay the bills, one must not therefore conclude that your earth journey is about nothing else. I live in Marin County, enough to bring laughter and, in some cases, nostalgia to my friends in Vermont. However. Living here has provided a great observation post to the madness.

There are people in Hummers. These are tanks without the artillery and I ask, as one sentient being to I hope others, can that be far off? As Kurt V would say, and so it goes.

The news I got on the 15th tee box at San Geronimo was that the federal court in New York had handed the FCC its head over the issue of whether a network and its affiliates could be prosecuted/heavily sanctioned anytime anyone issued an expletive over the air. The head of the FCC, a nutcase pseudo-Christian, is worried that the minds of impressionable 10-year-olds will be poisoned should their ears pick up the words “Fuck” or “Shit.”

The guy must lead a very sheltered life.

There are, I hate to even bring this up given the clowns now controlling the Supreme Court (thanks, Democrats, for not bothering to fight on this), constitutional issues here. One is whether the draconian hand of the FCC operates effectively as prior restraint, a condition roundly condemned by previous Supreme Courts whose members could actually read entire sentences without drooling. Two is whether a long history of case law establishes that neither of those terms could be considered “obscene” unless designed to appeal solely to prurient interest and further, unless the entirety of the program existed of nothing but the dangerous words.

Three is this: the airwaves belong to the people. They do not belong to the fucking government, nor to the corporate empires which control them. They belong to us. And the good news is this: the regular broadcast media are history. Where do the kids get their news and information? The internet. And so long as the government doesn’t figure out a way to take it over, and so long as we resist with everything we’ve got, then it’s possible for the people to find out something approaching truth.

So fuck the FCC.

It's a pattern by now: a girl or girls at a University is/are sexually assaulted by a group of ballplayers. There's a big stink about it. The players deny it and their parents hire lawyers. The reputation of the victims is trashed both by direct assault and cute innuendo. The local prosecutor is made to understand the meaning of pressure. D.A. offices decide with great reluctance that there isn't enough evidence "to convict," and charges, if even brought in the first place, are dropped.

There have been several such cases on the East Coast recently. Now comes our very own DeAnza College, where a 17-year-old girl, so drugged as to be barely conscious, was taken into a back room and raped at least once before an appreciative crowd of eight or ten baseball players. The group assault was stopped only when three members of the women's soccer team, alerted to this as they were on their way out the door, forced in the door and carried the victim, who could not walk, away to safety.

There is no real dispute that this girl was raped, nor that these baseball players stood around watching. The D.A., however, says that she can't prosecute because it's not clear who the ACTUAL rapist was. I am not making this up.

Never mind that the victim believes she can identify the perpetrator, where is the problem in prosecuting every one of those miserable assholes who enjoyed the show? They were, at least, aiding and abeting a felony, and conspiring to do so, and although I haven't practiced criminal law in many years I strongly suspect that there is plenty of evidence to nail them on these acts.

I'm sure it's only a coincidence that the D.A. was the beneficiary of a large campaign check – thought to have been for the last election – from one of the punks' lawyers.

Then there's the grand jury fiasco. The D.A. granted immunity to three players in exchange for their testimony. At this point, the case began to go away because even though it seemed a certainty that the grand jury would indict the rapist and perhaps others, the D.A. changed course and didn't complete the presentation, thus there was no indictment.

Couple of years ago, a local girl, a high school girl at San Rafael High, was taken from a party by four boys, athletes, and held hostage in a van belonging to one of the boys, where she was raped with a bottle and otherwise tortured for several hours. The athletes, though prosecuted, did ZERO time in the slammer. Essentially, they got away with it. Meanwhile, the victim was so terrorized by "friends" of the rapists on campus that she was forced to leave school. The boys, all athletes and in at least one case from a prominent family, were neither punished nor ostracized on campus. The school district decided to handle the situation by reminding girls to be more careful when they go to parties. I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP.

I remember feminism. There was a time in this country, not that long ago, when we seemed to be waking up to the amazing idea that women have the same rights as human beings that men have, and that one corollary of this was that it was not okay to rape them anymore. I guess those days are gone. Women have gone back to being targets. We're experiencing an orgy of testosterone, a glorification of over-driven macho violence. It's being sold to us and we're buying it.

I don't know what it's going to take, but at some point some of these rapists are going to run into somebody's shotgun. It would be nice if, before it comes to that, they run into some prosecutors with the moral character to put their sorry balls in jail.

You know the story about the guy who's been hiding out or hibernating for a lot of years and finds his culture shocked upon emergence into the world? Variations on that theme in quite a few books and films, something we apparently wonder about.

My opinion is that the guy would see cultural events with the clarity and incomprehension, both, of any outsider. I say this because it's the state of mind in which I locate myself this evening, having witnessed with my own eyes and ears the latest Democratic candidates' "debate".

I had not watched politicians for many years. It only encourages them. But I'd heard of them. I'd heard of Wolf Blitzer, too. Now I've seen them. It is a scary, scary matter.

Seemingly clear:
1. CNN is essentially corrupt, from its 'news' personnel, especially Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper, to its format, which gives the "top tier" candidates much more time, and indulgence, during the proceeding;
2. The fact that the candidates have all learned the Howard Dean Lesson which, regardless of what you think, is NOT to avoid screaming but to avoid mentioning that the media monopoly should be broken. Consequently, when discussing how campaign money turns candidates into whores (in my opinion, many are whores from the beginning and have no need to be turned into them), none of them bothered to mention that, the airwaves BELONGING to the people, and the media monsters leasing them at maybe .0000001 of their actual value, it ought to be a good idea to give candidates free time.
3. The media sees the horrors of Iraq as a sort of game show adventure, with Blitzer and his stooge, whose name has mercifully escaped me, casually asking the spouse of a man now in Iraq, "What's on tap?"
4. Real issues and matters of deep importance do not matter to Blitzer and his bunch. Repeatedly, this grotesque pretence of journalism diverted talk about fundamental questions into the most provocative – and fear-mongering – of questions. For example, he asked whether these candidates, with the chance to kill Bin Laden, and with "limited" deaths of innocent people, would "take him out." And several said yes. Hillary Clinton, a United States Senator who believes she should have my support, said "if we can do it without a great amount of collateral damage, then go ahead and do it."
5. Voices of reason are simply ignored. Although John Edwards is a serious enough candidate to compel attention, the host and the format make a point of marginalizing and ignoring anything said by Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel, each of whom had interesting things to say and virtually no time in which to say them. Kucinich, for example, said that he did not think – in answer to the kill Bin Laden hypothetical – that assassination ought to be a component of American policy.
6. Hillary is not as bright as some of you hope she is. At one point, discussing Pakistan (about which she said nothing), she promised to "focus like the proverbial laser." Dear Hillary: if you find a proverb involving lasers, I will not only retract this remark but vote for you. Hint. I will NEVER vote for you.
7. It's dangerous to be sane, if a candidate. Following Clinton's answer, Obama allowed as to he would also "take him out." He was not discussing dating Bin Laden. He was euphemistically describing murder. Oh, I know, Bin Laden did such and such, and guess what? If he did he ought to be captured and tried in an international court for crimes against humanity. That's what makes us different from people who blow up buildings and kill innocent people... assuming we are.
8. Anderson Cooper may actually be plastic, or made of some material containing a lot of plastic. That's not real skin.
9. CNN Commentators – what the fuck IS a "commentator"? Someone who offers "comment"? I know a lot of those people; I hear them comment every day, often about George Bush. They aren't on television, however... Anyhow, the CNN Commentators said they were "keeping 'em honest!" And then wondered aloud whether Hillary could appeal to the "anti-war left wing" in the Democratic Party.

Seemingly unclear:
1. Whether the country stands a chance.
2. Whether the brainwashing of the general public can be overcome.
3. Whether a decent candidate can even survive this brutal, unreal process.
4. Whether people like Blitzer could be prosecuted.

I am now in need of an antidote. Luckily, I have an old Ronald Reagan film, "Brother Rat," available, and the last of my daily ration of tobacco. I'm going to watch Ronnie and remember when America was not completely, and perhaps irretrievably, insane.