“It is the worship of strength and charisma themselves that I find alarming in a democratic system. I think once the electorate acts from its own troubled id, we are vulnerable to the election of untold numbers of scoundrels, one of whom or a series of whom, could spell the end of democracy.” Cary Tennis

Could Arianna as governor put the party back into increasingly one-party California?

“Straight viewers… want to learn about people who are different from them. We can’t just have all white, middle class characters on television,” says Scott Seomin of GLAAD. Funny, then, that the article talks up NBC’s “Will & Grace” and “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” where all the characters are… white and middle class.

The latest Trixie spinoff: the Lincoln Park Gay Chad Society. From a cultural studies perspective, this is more properly a reaction, but to what? to Trixies, to the circuit-queen scene, to gay assimilation or to being closeted, to masculinity or femininity? hmm.

Robert Kagan’s hypothesis of irreconcilable differences between the EU and USA has merit, says Stephen Holmes, but only because it cuts both ways: well-policed Europe only conceives of civil solutions to conflict, whereas militarized America only thinks of bombs. (Or maybe just West Texas only thinks of bombs.) On another note, war proponents often claim that Hussein is “like Hitler.” But not even Texans have yet suggested war as a way to liberate the people of Zimbabwe from a dictator who just declared himself “Hitler ten-fold.”