I purchased $160.75 of alcohol today. I buy the best value rather than the best product, which today meant purchases of a Busch 20-pack, a 12-pack of Sierra Nevada, nine bottles of Freixenet champagne, 3 bottles of Cristalino champagne, and a handle of Sobieski vodka. I got a 20 percent volume discount on the case of champagne, so my total actually cashed out at $137.38. I don't plan on drinking it all in one sitting. The purpose of my stockpile is tomorrow's tax increase in Massachusetts. The sales tax increases from 5 to 6.25 percent, with an additional change to the law making that tax applicable to alcohol sales. I am not a tax cheat for avoiding the new levy; the governor and legislature are tax cheats for devising it. There are already state taxes built into the price of alcohol. So, the new law applying the sales tax on alcohol is a tax upon a tax. I wish I could say Massachusetts stands alone in such inventive revenue schemes. Proposed cash grabs include Washington, DC's $51-a-year charge for street lights, Oregon's $50 per beer keg production tax, and New York's $10 cover charge to the strip club's doorman/taxman. Such greed for my money fuels my cheerful contempt for the state, which, I can assure you--far more than any stinginess on my part--served as the impetus for my liquor-store splurge. It's not so much that I want to save money as it is that I don't want to give any more money to the tax cheats on Beacon Hill.

I have returned from a camping/research trip to upstate New York, where I spent a day combing through papers in Syracuse University's library and spent a night aside Oneida Lake. The best thing about camping is my tent, which, despite a downpour, kept its occupants dry. There is something comforting about hearing rain fall but not feeling rain fall. The worst thing about camping is the campers. I imagine their ranks to include level-3 sex offenders and thieves itching to Shanghai me as I visit the restroom at 4 a.m. I didn't come to this prejudice through interaction but rather intuition. Perhaps they have the same stereotypes of me as I do of them, pegging me as a laid off carnival worker or the proprietor of a rural meth laboratory. To spite me, my fellow campers fail to hatch the contrivances against me that I that I know they wished to realize. I break camp, and break for home--a wooden structure as good at keeping out ne'er-do-wells as my vinyl tent is at keeping the rain at bay.

A picture is worth a thousand words. May I add a few words to go alongside the thousand evoked by this remarkable photograph? The man behind the camera had just managed a tour by The Beatles and, at their recommendation, found himself managing a tour by this lesser known act. The gentleman on the right wrote the most famous guitar riff in rock n roll history that day. Two years later, he would steal his companion's girlfriend and later write this remorseless song about the whole affair. The gentleman on the left, unable even to get his finger gesture correct, managed in his short life to father children with five different women and make the friend to his left appear as a choir boy in comparison. Shortly after getting kicked out of the band he founded for taking performance inhibiting drugs, he was found at the botton of his swimming pool. Less happy is the fate of the background structure. It now serves as the headquarters of the Church of Scientology.

"It used to be the host only had to provide one beer," Howie Carr writes of the pending beer summit between Sergeant James Crowley and Professor Henry Louis Gates at the White House. "Everyone would be happy, because it was the best kind of beer--free beer." Alas, in the age of 57 (thousand?) channels and nothing on, the beer aisle offers confusion in the guise of variety.

I recently visited North Bridge in Concord, site of the "shot heard round the world." More men fell in the town where I grew up than in Concord or Lexington on April 19, 1775, but they get the recognition. Go figure. This isn't my gripe about Minuteman National Historic Park. This is: the visitor center doesn't have flush toilets. This isn't a misguided attempt to recreate the out-house conditions that prevailed 234 years ago. It's a boasting point in the park's fight to save the Earth. Above each toilet, a sign announces that the toilets use no water or chemicals. Simple gravity takes human waste and turns it into compost in a mechanism under the building. Some people call that progress. Others call it gross.

National Review, long credited with draining fever swamps on the Right, does a marvelous service in thoroughly debunking that which never really needed debunking in the first place: President Barack Obama's naturalized citizenship. "Much foolishness has become attached to the question of President Obama's place of birth, and a few misguided souls among the Right have indulged it," the magazine's editors note. "The myth that Barack Obama is ineligible to be president represents the hunt for a magic bullet that will make all the unpleasant complications of his election and presidency disappear. We are used to seeing conspiracy theories from the Left, for instance among the one in three Democrats who believe that 9/11 was an inside job conducted with the foreknowledge of the Bush administration. We've seen everything under the sun blamed on Dick Cheney and Halliburton, and Rosie O'Donnell has given us much mirth with her metallurgical expertise, while Andrew Sullivan has beclowned himself and tarnished the good name of The Atlantic with his investigation into the 'real' parentage of Trig Palin." It would have been nice if, during the George W. Bush presidency, some leading organ of leftist thought had taken its lunatics to task for promoting conspiracy theories surrounding the Carlyle Group, Diebold voting machines, or myriad other fantastical suppositions. It's commendable for National Review to douse water instead of gasoline on these fires of political dementia.

Marketing gurus warn against launching a product in August, when families are on vacation and nobody is paying attention. This makes you wonder about the timing of the president's bill to nationalize part of the health insurance industry. Atop its byzantine length, the used-car-salesman tact to close the sell as fast as possible, and the attempt to sequester congressmen from their constituents before holding the vote, the plan to hold the vote on the bill during the dog days of August seems part of an the overall strategy of keeping citizens in the dark about legislation that, if passed, will have an enormous impact upon their lives.

Three years ago, before we knew anything about the canine gladitorial contests taking place on the Atlanta Falcons quarterback's property, FlynnFiles labeled Michael Vick "the most overrated player in sports." Yesterday, the NFL reinstated Vick (sort of), allowing him to practice now and possibly play in regular season games starting in week six. Reinstatement is just. What Michael Vick did was horrible, but the criminal justice system punished him for that. Take away his freedom for a time, but don't take away his ability to pursue his livelihood. Beyond incarceration, Vick has paid an enormous price--he's lost millions in income, the ability to earn any endorsement money, and the respect of fans. There is a market for Michael Vick the football player. But is there a market for Michael Vick the quarterback? After six years in a pass-happy era NFL, Michael Vick never threw for 3,000 yards in a season. Even without the two year layoff, Vick might have been fighting for a starting quarterback job at this point in his career. With the two year layoff, he makes for an interesting all-purpose player: fourth receiver, wildcat back, punt returner, etc. Less interesting than whether an NFL team signs Michael Vick (one will), is how Michael Vick is utilized once signed.

It's hard to decide if Rep. John Conyers's "what good is reading the bill" candor regarding the 1,018-page health care legislation is more refreshing than disturbing or more disturbing than refreshing. Watch the clip and decide for yourself.

Sarah Palin's farewell address partly imitated 1962 Richard Nixon ("You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore"), and partly imitated 1796 George Washington ("the disinterested warnings of a parting friend"). It was better than her rambling July 3 speech, and conveys a few core sentiments: Sarah Palin loves Alaska, hates the press, and champions small government. "Be wary of accepting government largesse," Palin advised. "It doesn't come free and often, accepting it takes away everything that is free, melting into Washington's powerful 'care-taking' arms will just suck incentive to work hard and chart our own course right out of us, and that not only contributes to an unstable economy and dizzying national debt, but it does make us less free."

When the economy was booming in the final quarter of 1992, the press reported that the economy was in deep recession. There was a presidential election, and the reality of an economy in expansion for more than a year-and-a-half didn't mesh with Bill Clinton's rhetoric of a "Bush recession." Mission accomplished: the media's candidate won the election. Seventeen years later, Newsweek declares on its cover: "The Recession Is Over!" Highlighting a road construction project in Massachusetts, the Newsweek story's opening paragraph claims this is "one small manifestation of President Barack Obama's ambitious strategy for jump-starting the economy." One anecdote of economic activity doesn't make an economic boom. The rules seem to call for labelling a recovery a recession when a Republican is in the White House and labelling a recession a recovery when a Democrat is in the White House. Evidence that Newsweek doesn't believe what its cover states can be found in the asterisk that accompanies the boast. The latest numbers show that the gross domestic product continues to shrink. In fact, economists predict that when the government releases the data next week it will show the second quarter of '09 as the fourth consecutive quarter of GDP contraction--the first time that's happened since the Great Depression. It is possible that when the numbers get crunched for the third quarter of '09 they will show that recovery has replaced recession. But right now, there is simply no hard evidence, just a lot of wish, to the claim that the recession is over.

I once prided myself on not being into those time wasters commonly referred to as "games." The sight of slobbish, extended-adolescence men playing X-Box on the couch (think Shaun of the Dead's Ed), park-bench pensioners pencilling in crossword puzzles, office drones transfixed by solitaire, or plain old board (bored?) games struck me as brain dead past times. Read a book. Go to the gym. Paint your house. Do something to redeem the time rather than simply pass the time. Alas, my recent Scrabble addiction places me in the ranks of the living dead.

Hi, I'm Dan, and I'm a Scrabbleholic. It's been four hours since my last game. This past week, boasting three bingos--Scrabble lingo for exhausting all seven tiles in a turn--I scored 513. I am ashamed that I am proud of my accomplishment.

Curious to see how my all-time high ranked with the all-time high, I discovered that that the greatest Scrabble game ever played was fought out in Lexington, Massachusetts, which borders the town in which I grew up. Playing in a Unitarian church (how Lexington!), carpenter Michael Cresta scored 830 points. Wayne Yorra, who, like Randy the Ram, works the deli counter in a local supermarket, posted 490 points (just 23 points less than my high). In addition to scoring the most points in a sanctioned Scrabble contest, Cresta notched the highest scoring Scrabble move ever, a 365-point bingo on the word "quixotry," and combined with Yorra for the greatest number of points in a single game (1320). Not a record, but quite impressive nonetheless, is the fact that Cresta began with a 169-0 deficit. Quitters never win and winners never quit.

More amazing to me than the Scrabbletastic players are the Scrabbominable player haters who note that neither Cresta nor Yorra was "an expert-level player," and that each player's mistakes allowed the other to capitalize mightily. As Stefan Fatsis wrote at Slate a few weeks after 2006's record-breaking game, "Cresta-Yorra was a fluke." Citing a MIT professor's examination of the game, Fatsis lamely points out that "Cresta and Yorra had better [potential] moves on 14 of their 22 nonbingo turns." So what? Nobody has made better moves in a game. We know this because nobody has scored higher.

"The wrong moves produced history," Fastis contends. "But is that enough? If 830--or any record--happens as a result of boneheaded play, tactical ignorance, or the pursuit of a good time, should it count? Or should records be reserved for those who have earned the right to set them, and who set them in expert fashion?" Did the Mighty Casey strike out, or did the pitcher strike out the Mighty Casey?

Save the asterisks for Barry Bonds. Michael Cresta's amazing feat says as much about him as it does about Scrabble snobs. Don't hate the player. Hate the game. And if you hate the game, don't play the game--which gives me an idea: enter a Scrabble recovery program and get a life.

"Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small," Henry Kissinger quipped years ago. The controversy surrounding another Harvard professor proves the axiom. The Cambridge cops have dropped disorderly conduct charges against Henry Louis Gates. Henry Louis Gates can't seem to drop the matter. His friend, the president of the United States, has weighed in on the tempest in a teapot. "I don't know all the facts," Obama admits, but he nevertheless opines that "the Cambridge police acted stupidly." Couldn't the same thing more justifiably be said of Henry Louis Gates? Didn't he act stupidly in refusing to show identification when asked and calling the cop--who gave dying Celtics star Reggie Lewis mouth-to-mouth sixteen years ago--a racist for investigating a suspected burglary at his house? Couldn't the same thing also be said of the president? It's not a good idea for the nation's chief law enforcement officer to slam cops for doing their jobs. Let's not make a federal case out of everything, particularly something so petty as a dropped disorderly conduct charge.

CNN.com recognizes some similarities between the doomed HilaryCare of 1994 and the troubled ObamaCare of 2009. I recognize a few more. In 1994, Hillary unleashed a monstrous 1,100 page plan. Fifteen years later, Obama's congressional allies put forth a byzantine bill of 1,018 pages. One of the most effective pieces of ammunition against Hillarycare sixteen years ago was a chart, often seen upon an easel next to Senator Phil Gramm, entitled "a bureaucratic mess." That, too, has been resurrected to great effect. The political hit that President Clinton took over socialized medicine--losing 54 seats in the House, 8 in the Senate, 12 governorships, and almost 500 state legislatives seats--seems to have struck, albeit on a scale largely unmeasurable thus far, in Obama's downward poll numbers. In 1994, just one congressional Republican--James Jeffords of Vermont, who would later switch parties--voted for HillaryCare. In 2009, there doesn't seem to be an effort to reach out to the minority party. Today, as was the case fifteen years ago, Democrats were the majority party. The inability of Clinton to keep his congressional ranks in check doomed his plan. The same scenario seems to be repeating itself. It's not just that Clinton and Obama so catered to party purists that they alienated just about every Republican; they aliented a substantial number of Democrats, too. And it is this inability to learn from the past that seems the albatross dragging down all Democrat efforts at health-care reform. Whether the would be reformer's name was Truman, Clinton, or Obama, the public's response has been the same: "no" to government-run health care.

Only someone so arrogant as a Harvard professor would demand an apology after telling a cop, "Ya, I'll speak to your mama outside." Neither the policeman, nor his mother, have demanded that Henry Louis Gates, Jr. undergo sensitivity training. But Gates says that's just punishment for the cop (for doing his job). If you haven't been following the story, here's a refresher: a policeman showed up at esteemed Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates's home last Thursday after a neighbor reported to the cops that she witnessed a man attempting to muscle his way through the front door. The neighbor identified Gates to the police as the man she saw attempting to crash through the front door. Cops asked for identification, and Gates went into do-you-know-who-I-am mode--paradoxically refusing to identify himself. Gates taunted the cops with the "racist" tag, but it's clear his behavior rather than his race brought the police to his home. Instead of handing over his identification to quell the matter, Gates inflamed it by acting as though his front porch were a Harvard classroom. He lectured about racism and the police as though Cambridge were Birmingham and arresting officer James Crowley were Bull Connor. Ultimately, there's no law against being a jerk, particularly on private property, so it's right that the Cambridge police have dropped the charges. A cooler head hasn't prevailed for Gates. Unfortunately, the cops didn't catch Henry Louis Gates in a bad mood last Thursday; he is apparently a jerk, as his imperious calls for apologies and sensitivity training, and the avoidance of apologies and sensitivity on his part, have made a bad situation worse.

It should be a rule that when conspiracy cranks speak Twilight Zone music play in the background. Even though it's not, that's what I hear whenever they talk. I can only imagine the noises they hear. Rep. Mike Castle must have felt as though he were in an episode of The Twilight Zone when this crank hijacked a town meeting about health care with a tirade about Barack Obama's birth certificate. I know I felt that way on the radio the other night when I opened up the dialogue on Obama's health care plan only to have the first caller divert into a rant about the president's citizenship. Even if we were to grant the dubious premise of the "birthers," who cares if Barack Obama was born in Kenya? His mother was a United States citizen, which confers citizenship upon her child. John McCain's mother didn't give birth to her son in the United States, but nobody doubted the Republican presidential nominee's Constitutional standing to serve as president.

I don't believe in conspiracy theories. Reincarnation is another matter enterely. Before becoming a birther, Rep. Castle's confronter was known as a "truther," alleging George W. Bush allowed 9/11 to happen and planted explosives in World Trade Center 7. She exposed the lunar landing as a Hollywood production. She heard the shots fired on the grassy knoll. She spit up the water contaminated with fluoride. She endured a series of experiments at the hands of the Roswell aliens. She wrote The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

When she talks, decibels substitute for logic. When she writes, she eschews Times New Roman, Arial, and Courier for ALLCAPS. The five books that she has read, and the eleven books that she has authored, are self publshed. Evidence against her favored conspiracy theory doesn't undermine the theory at all but instead demonstrates the ingenuity of the conspirators' plot. She was an inveterate pusher of pamphlets until the internet came along. She doesn't know the meaning of non sequitur; every subject, no matter how removed from her obsession, proves an invitation to inject the conspiracy theory into the conversation. "Say, Mary, that's some nice weather we've been experiencing." "Yes, Tom, for it was on a day not unlike today that George Bush's minions set the explosives in the World Trade Center and arranged for those airplane crashes to cover their tracks."

However tempting it is to throw one's hands up and conclude the Left has their crackpots and the Right has theirs, it's not that simple. The "I'll trade you my birther for your truther and a kook to be named later" logic doesn't always work because birthers and truthers occasionally overlap. The loyalty is to conspiracy theories, not this party or that party.

The irony for the conspiracy buff whose ideology fuels his theories is that the louder he peddles his accusations, the more the accused benefits. Charging Bill Clinton with the murder of Ron Brown and various Little Rock characters didn't discredit the president; it discredited his critics. Had George W. Bush invented a set of enemies, it's unlikely he could have come up with a more loathesome bunch than the Hollywood whiners, rent-free rent-a-rallies, and crackpots who attacked his administration from day 1 to day 2292. The birthers who point to Obama's failure to produce a birth certificate as proof of his unnaturalized status may be instead highlighting the cleverness of a politician who does nothing to rebut the allegations against him because he knows a patsy opposition when he sees one. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I would say that conspiracy theorists are really agents provocateur doing the bidding of the ostensible target of attack.

But I am not, so I'll just say that conspiracy theorists are incredibly naive people who have a simpleton's way of unnecessarily complicating the obvious.

Ted Kennedy's face is on the cover of Newsweek, his words propel the HBO documentary "Teddy: In His Own Words," and his name is on the lips of every Democrat seeking to enact a state-run health care plan. The senior senator from Massachusetts is seemingly everywhere--everywhere but the United States Senate. Read my piece in the American Spectator explaining how absentee senator Ted Kennedy risks undermining his political legacy by treating his senate seat as a family legacy.

While reading Mortimer Adler's memoirs a bat--my reaction says of the sanguinary variety--nose dived over the kitchen table that doubles for my attic desk. Heretofore, the creatures had merely left evidence of their visits. But an actual sighting, let alone a close encounter, has been quite rare. The man versus beast showdown prompted man to perform a 360 degree 48-inch vertical leap, let loose a 120-decibel feminized rebel yell, and squat-sprint 0-to-60 down the stairs.

A few years back, upon spotting the remnants of my uninvited guests' visits, I vowed to capture the mouse. Purchasing four glue traps that had caught two such creatures at my former obode, I was confused when the sticky death devices didn't execute my capital punishment order. Then I caught sight of the rodent while climbing the stairs to the attic. He was a most unusual mouse, pitch-black with wings. I thought better that night of migrating upward to the otherwise pleasant reading atmosphere.

But when the bats are away, in the attic I play. The overventilated room allows indoor cigar smoking. My attic is spacious: it matches the house underneath's floorplan without any walls getting in the way. A stereo, purchased at Building 19 for $30, blares attic-appropriate audio: early Kinks, early Velvet Underground, early Stones, and early Floyd. Two bulbs illuminate the bat cave. There's no television, no internet, and no people.

But there are books: Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies picked up at a shop on Charing Cross Road in London but not read thus far; John Humphrey Noyes's History of American Socialisms purchased at America's largest used bookstore, Powell's, in Portland, Oregon; Jefferson Davis's Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, one volume of which once sparked uninvited negative comments from a fellow Burger King patron; and a multicolored set of Will & Ariel Durant's Story of Civilization nearly takes up an entire shelf. In the midst of reading the series in the mid-1990s, I discovered my father in the midst of reading it, too. Coincidence, or genetics?

A friend, who, like Jesus, is a carpenter, performed the miracle of transforming my rustic third floor into a gentleman of leisure's library. Whereas Jesus turned water into wine, his twenty-first century carpenter counterpart turned my $1,000 into four nailed-in bookcases boasting more than forty shelves. He wanted $800, but I talked him up to $1,000. The reverse bartering was a first for me, and probably for him too.

Attics are superior to damp basements and musty garages as far as books go. Moisture is the enemy. But dry attics, as I discovered in my library's first year, aren't ideal, either. The vents ensure that the temperature inside, at least in winter, differs little from the temperature outside. When the mercury drops below 20 degrees outside, it drops below 40 degrees inside, which can cause books to curl outward. The bats can also apparently attract bed-bugs and other tiny creatures that feed on the winged creepies and find shelter in books. The former problem can be largely alleviated by packing books tightly on shelves; the latter, by getting rid of the bats. And this is the challenge. I bought steel wool at Lowe's to plug up the small gaps between my chimney and roof, which I strongly suspect is the critter invasion point. But what if the bats are there when I attempt to caulk the cracks? And what if the bats are inside when I install my steel wool to keep them outside? All of this has led to procrastination (understandably, right?) on my part.

Though I put off my confrontation with the bats, I still visit my attic. Soviet propaganda posters advertise the library theme: silence. Every where one looks, Stalin's stern social realism tells you to be quiet--evil Uncle Sams, Nazi wolves in sheep's clothing, and White Russian spies may be listening. An oversized classroom-map of Europe, complete with captions detailing significant historical events, adorns one wall. Elsewhere, Patriot linebacker glossies, record-store poster refuse, and license plates past spruce up the Spartan surroundings.

The visuals distract me that my library is essentially a giant shed sitting atop my house. They can't take my mind off the reality that my third-floor retreat is a hot-spot for germy, revolting bats. The flying rodents are present even in their absence. Will I be able to read in peace after my animal encounter, or, will I always tense up in anticipation of the next attack? I live in fear of their bed-bug entourage, their copious waste, their annoying chirps, and, in the case of .5 percent of flying mammals, their rabies. Should my enemies charge me with being bat$#!+ crazy, I will gladly invite them to collect evidence from my attic floor.

I will be guest hosting the Michele McPhee Show on Boston's Talk Evolution 96.9 WTKK from 7-10 p.m. this Friday evening. Listeners outside of the range of 96.9's powerful FM signal, don't fret. You can listen live to the program by clicking on the "listen live" button at WTKK's website. Readers: what should I discuss with the listeners on Friday's show?

If you have a right to health care, who has the responsibility to pay for it? The initial clause has been talked to death. The one following it has been, until now, been largely ignored. President Obama and his congressional allies plan to impose a 5.4 surtax on wealthy people to pay for his grandiose vision of state-subsidized health care. Those who carry the struggling economy will be burdened with more weight, ensuring that the struggling economy will struggle more. Some residents of California, New York, and Rhode Island will face tax rates approaching sixty percent. At what point do enthusiasts of big government lose their enthusiasm? Seventy-five percent tax rates? Ninety percent? One-hundred and five percent? The message from the nanny state is clear: You don't have a responsibility to feed yourself, provide shelter for your family, secure your retirement, or insure yourself against medical expenses. Somebody wealthier than you does.

"In one respect the system has remained completely consistent throughout. It blames all problems on external influences beyond its control and takes credit for any and all favorable occurrences. It thereby continues to promote the myth that the private economy is unstable, while its behavior continues to document the reality that government is today the major source of economic instability."
--Milton and Rose Friedman, Free To Choose, 1980

Tune in to the Dennis Prager Show today at 11 a.m. Pacific/2 p.m. Eastern to hear me discuss my article on Jonestown. Though I wrote it last November, the piece continues to get linked and draw interest, as the Prager invite attests. It is reassuring to discover that I'm not alone in finding it peculiar that Bay Area political celebrities--Willie Brown, Harvey Milk, George Moscone, Huey Newton, Angela Davis--buddied up to a man who orchestrated the deaths of more than 900 people only to have the seedy alliance tossed down the memory hole. Mark Taylor will be guest hosting. Click the "listen live" button on this page to, well, listen live.

When Hemisphere Broadcasting took over Boston's WBCN in the 1970s, and laid off numerous station employees, the remaining staff struck. Disc jockey Charles Laquidara, for instance, played a loop of Superman by The Kinks, who had come out in support of the strike, for his entire show. The corporation buckled.

Thirty years later, as CBS prepares to close the storied "Rock of Boston" for good, no such theatrics are in the cards. DJ's now do what they are told. As Tom Petty put it, "There goes the last DJ/Who plays what he wants to play." One WBCN personality, Adam12, ocassionally jokes about how he's restricted from playing songs he'd like to play (I once heard him talk about what would happen to him if he dared stray from the approved music and play The Who's I Can See For Miles). But that's about as rebellious as it gets at the Crock of Boston these days. It's Pearl Jam, then Weezer, then Rage Against the Machine, then AC/DC. Then repeat.

But it wasn't always so. When the classical music Boston Concert Network (get it--WBCN) flipped to rock more than forty years ago, Peter Wolf, later of J. Geils Band fame, spun records there (Where, but from his days as a disc jockey, do you think Peter Wolf could rap so quickly about Wooba Gooba with the Green Teeth?). Before finding pop-culture stardom as one of the original MTV VJs, J.J. Jackson became a staple at WBCN. WBCN is where Carter Alan first exposed America to U2.

Now it broadcasts the New England Patriots. It plays host to talk shows that are occasionally interrupted by music. It operates on a playlist. Like the bands it features, WBCN is past its sell date. Perhaps that's just the nature of stations that market themselves as "underground." When WBCN launched in 1968 with Cream's "I Feel Free," they were cutting edge. When WBCN played the same song ten years later, they could hardly claim the "underground" label. Yesterday's cool is tomorrow's boring bomb. An adventuresome station became stale to retain their initial audience. They had an identity crisis, not knowing whether to continue playing the songs that made them famous or to live up to their reputation as the station that pushed the musical envelope. This confusion resulted in a part classic rock/part cutting edge format in the 1980s. I listened and loved it. Then, the station, which had regularly graced Rolling Stone's year-end "best of" list, embraced Limp Bizkit, Korn, and Lincoln Park in the late 1990s, completely obliterating the identity it once had. Now it's a hard rock station the plays the odd tune by U2 and Coldplay. When you first heard a band on WBCN in its heyday, you knew the band was about to break. When you first hear a band on WBCN now, you know they've already jumped the shark. A station that once shaped musical interests now follows them.

If you're not from Boston, you might be asking yourself why you are reading a post about a radio station you've never listened to. Yet, this same scenario has probably played out in your town, too. A station catering to a local audience gets bought by a corporate behemoth. It subsequently guts the on-air talent, imposes playlists, and perhaps even pipes in hosts who can't even pronounce the names of surrounding communities. It's impersonal, distant, and sounds like everything else. Like chain restaurants and strip malls, radio by remote makes your town more like every other town. It not only operates under the assumption that Boston is Indianapolis is Orlando is Denver, but it helps bring that assumption closer to reality. The cookie cutter makes for good cookies but bad radio.

As Bono put it in 1993, "Without 'BCN, we'd all be f#!*ed." But the real WBCN went off the air years ago. Yesterday's announcement that the station bearing those call letters would cease broadcasting in August was just a delayed reaction to reality.

Had the Bush administration not planned for assassinating al Qaeda targets, I would understand the Congressional Democrats calls for investigations into Dick Cheney and other nefarious cartoon boogeymen. The calls for investigations of the Bush administration for discussing the idea of assassinating al Qaeda targets are far more puzzling. Did the Eisenhower administration investigate Harry Truman for not informing everybody in Congress about the plan to nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Who in Congress gave Lincoln the okay to fire General McClellan? How about the Minutemen? Did they wait to see the whites of the enemies' eyes before shooting or for an invitation from Nancy Pelosi? It is the nature of presidents to seek to defend America from all enemies foreign and domestic and it is the nature of intelligence agencies to keep secrets. That Congressional Democrats object to this--a secret plan to kill al Qaeda members at war with the U.S.--itself merits an investigation. Coming so soon after so many Democrats on Capitol Hill--Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, John Edwards, John Murtha, Rod Blagojevich, Pat Kennedy--abdicated their duties and voted to "authorize" the president to go to war in Iraq makes the current phony outrage over being denied input into a plan that never got off the ground laughable.

I caught Wilco over the weekend in Lowell, Massachusetts. The minor league park that hosted the general admission concert really captures the spirit of the city, with the massive red-brick buildings that once housed industrial workers serving as a backdrop. A torrential downpour cut short Wilco's set by a few songs, but not before they could play some favorites--Shot in the Arm, Via Chicago, and Spiders (Kidsmoke), a ten-minute number that hypnotizes listeners before a sonic explosion shakes them out of their trance. If you don't know Wilco, they earned the distinction during the recent national mourning over Michael Jackson of posting the highest ranking non-MJ album on the charts--number 11 on Amazon.com while the King of Pop ruled the top ten. That new album, called Wilco (the album), features, you guessed it, Wilco (the song), a duet with Feist, some George Harrison-style guitars. It's my favorite of their offerings since the recently departed Jay Bennett departed from Wilco. But like an earlier Wilco track explained, you'll never hear it on the radio. And that's why I had to travel to Lowell.

The hypocrisy of Anita Hill glares so brilliantly that she is apparently blind to it. The woman who attempted to deep-six Clarence Thomas now says that it's "high time" for diversity on the Supreme Court. When the nominee's name is Sonia Sotomayor, diversity is the flowery rationale. When the nominee's name is Clarence Thomas, he's lambasted as an affirmative action pick. The cynicism that inspires Barack Obama to select a second-rater because the ethnic immunity she brings to the hearings and the coalition-building she provides during electoral season, provokes his partisans, who see the world through a similarly distorted lense, to project their own machinations upon their adversaries.

Arturo Gatti was the most exciting boxer of the past decade only because Diego Corrales died in a motorcycle accident two years ago. Now Gatti, who fought three epic battles with Mickey Ward, is dead too. On Saturday, Brazilian police found the Italian brawler dead in a Porto de Galihnas hotel room. He had a wound to the back of the head, which is consistent with a coward's strike. Who would have ever dared to kill Arturo Gatti with a frontal blow? This is completley devastating, particularly as the news came upon the super-bowl of mixed-martial arts, to boxing. Between 1997 and 2003, Gatti fought in four Ring magazine "fights of the year." He split the contests, two and two. Arturo Gatti wasn't the best fighter; a strong case could be made that he was the best fighter to watch. Perversely, for the likes of Diego Coralles and Arturo Gatti, the ring, which seemed a most menacing venture, proved a safehouse. Perhaps that's why what seemed so daunting to us appeared as just another hurdle to them. Arturo Gatti, rest in peace.

Pope Benedict XVI presented President Barack Obama with a booklet on bioethics. The president presented the pope with a letter from Ted Kennedy. One is reminded of President Obama's commencement address at Notre Dame: "the fact is that at some level, the views of the two camps are irreconcilable."

"Counties that supported Obama last year have reaped twice as much money per person from the administration's $787 billion economic stimulus package as those that voted for his Republican rival, Sen. John McCain, a USA TODAY analysis of government disclosure and accounting records shows," the national broadsheet reports today. "That money includes aid to repair military bases, improve public housing and help students pay for college." This system of rewards and bribes to the voters can be added to the list of similarities between Barack Obama and Franklin Roosevelt. John T. Flynn detailed the politicization of Works Progress Administration boondoggles--the 1930s version of the stimulus package--in his book The Roosevelt Myth.

Buckle up for some facts that might hit you at 100 mph: "Yes, Massachusetts is ranked 50th in seat belt use," Michael Graham writes in today's Boston Herald. "But we are also ranked 50th in highway fatalities per miles traveled." How does one make sense of this counterintuitive contrast? Could it be that people who don't take precautions know that they need to be extra cautious?

John Fund offers the most compelling defense of Sarah Palin's resignation that I have come across. "Since Ms. Palin returned to Alaska after the 2008 campaign, some 150 FOIA requests have been filed and her office has been targeted for investigation by everyone from the FBI to the Alaska legislature," Fund's "Why Palin Quit" notes. "Most have centered on Ms. Palin's use of government resources, and to date have turned up little save for a few state trips that she agreed to reimburse the state for because her children had accompanied her. In the process, though, she accumulated $500,000 in legal fees in just the last nine months, and knew the bill would grow ever larger in the future." The personal toll must be staggering, but the gist of Fund's article is that the toll such attacks took upon the process of governing were, in Palin's estimation, insurmountable, which is why she resigned. "Attacks inside Alaska and largely invisible to the national media had paralyzed her administration," a source close to Palin explained to Fund. "She was fully aware she would be branded a 'quitter.' She did not want to disappoint her constituents, but she was no longer able to do the job she had been elected to do. Essentially, the taxpayers were paying for Sarah to go to work every day and defend herself." This is certainly a more noble reason to resign than a desire to sell books, pocket honorarium, and land your very own talk show. One's view of Sarah Palin probably predetermines one's view of why she resigned.

It's not enough that four Massachusetts judges got to impose their definition of marriage upon 6.3 million people. The state's attorney general now wants to impose that almost universally disputed definition upon the entire country. "In enacting DOMA, Congress overstepped its authority, undermined states' efforts to recognize marriages between same-sex couples, and codified an animus towards gay and lesbian people," the Bay State's lawsuit against the federal government claims. DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act, merely decrees that states that don't recognize gay marriage don't have to recognize the homosexual unions performed by states that do recognize gay marriage. It doesn't prohibit Massachusetts from solemnizing unions repulsive to the people of Alabama. It only absolves Alabama from solemnizing unions its voters find repulsive. In other words, Alabama isn't forcing its morality upon Massachusetts; Massachusetts is forcing its morality upon Alabama.

According to a Pew poll, Sarah Palin's approval rating among Republicans stood at 73 percent last week while her major rival for the 2012 GOP nomination enjoyed favorability ratings of 57 percent among the party faithful. Romney now holds a 25-24 percent lead over Palin in a new Rasmussen poll.

Palin, who until last week's abrupt resignation announcement stood as the favorite for 2012, played the role of "stupid" in the liberal script. Past performers include Calvin Coolidge, Dwight Eisenhower, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, Dan Quayle, and, most recently, George W. Bush. Mitt Romney, a bright and articulate man who ran a Fortune 500 business, the state of Massachusetts, and the Salt Lake City Olympic Games, isn't well cast as "stupid." Not to worry: the liberal script offers conservatives a second role, "evil." As the latest incarnation of "evil," Mitt Romney follows in the footsteps of Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Newt Gingrich. In case you didn't know his role, Romney's black hat--a helmet of finely combed, Aquanetted raven's hair--provides a clue.

If you've read John Stuart Mill or Samuel Francis, you're already familiar with the stupid party v. evil party dichotomy. And if you have read Ann Coulter's Slander, the taxonomy of GOP leaders into "stupid" and "evil" is similarly familiar. If you happen to have been blissfully unaware of any of these writers, then simple awareness of the political scene probably alerted you to these two typecasts of Republicans. There is, course, a third classification: the "token," never called that by his benefactors at PBS or the New York Times, who hire the token to reliably bash other Republicans while always professing his or her GOP bona fides. But three is too complex a concept for you stupid Republicans, so let us concern ourselves with just "stupid" and "evil."

Should "stupid" win the Republican nomination, she will face a man smarter than Einstein, more articulate than Cicero, and a better dinner guest than Truman Capote. Should "evil" win the Republican nomination, he will go toe-to-toe with a president who ranks somewhere above God on the depth chart of moral beings.

Stupid doesn't beat smart. So why are the partisans of the Highbrain in Chief kicking "stupid" when she is down? Evil, on the other hand, has been known to triumph over good. Do the authors of the "stupid" and "evil" script know what they are getting into by casting "evil" to play the lead villain?

Evil versus good always makes for a good story, which, after last week's spectacle of stupid is as stupid does, is what the 2012 election narrative is shaping up to be.

"Wasn't nothing strange about your daddy," political ambulance chaser Al Sharpton remarked to Michael Jackson's children during their father's funeral yesterday. The double negative seems a Freudian slip. Michael Jackson dyed his skin white. He kept monkeys and other exotic animals as pets. He once attended an awards show with Brooke Shields--and Emmanuel Lewis. By his own admission, he loved sleeping with children. As a grown man, he built an amusement park at his estate and entertained an endless stream of youngsters. He imbibed, injected, and inserted an enormous amount of drugs into his system. He married Debbie Rowe but never consumated their union that produced two children. There was a lot strange about Michael Jackson, including his extraordinary skills in music and dance. Should Jackson's children believe there was nothing strange about their daddy, who could blame them? Our families are normal to us, however abnormal they appear to outsiders. But Al Sharpton isn't a member of the Jackson family. He is an outsider. If he really believes there was nothing strange about Michael Jackson then there is something very strange about him.

Bury your invective with the dead. But don't bury your head in the sand. Texas Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee has sponsored a congressional resolution honoring Michael Jackson as a "humanitarian." A few other words come more readily to mind, like the one beginning with "p" that Rep. Peter King uttered. Michael Jackson had an amazing ability to entertain. But like so many brilliant performers, how he kept himself entertained repulsed. The best way for Jackson's fans to avoid the vitriol of Jackson's haters is to keep his life in perspective. The man could sing and dance like few others. Just leave it at that.

Sarah Palin's abrupt resignation announcement immediately reminded me of Richard Nixon's famous "You won't have Nixon to kick around" quip after losing his California gubernatorial bid in 1962. From Palin scheduling her announcement on the holiday weekend to her security barring late-arriving media to her "tweet" preempting the press conference, everything reeked of the Alaska governor sticking it to her tormentors.

There's no shame in that game, as scribes have maligned her like no other political figure I can recall. She didn't fire a librarian for refusing to ban books. She neither said that she could see Russia from her porch nor did she tout this as relevant foreign policy experience. She didn't fake her pregnancy of son Trig to hide the sordid truth of her teenage daughter bearing the child. But scribes said that she did. Every pol expects to be ridiculed. But family isn't part of the bargain. If Palin wishes to spare her mentally retarded son from uncomical comic caricatures, her fourteen-year-old daughter from rape jokes, and her family from mounting legal bills from frivolous ethics complaints, then I don't blame her for saying good riddance to politics.

But this isn't how I interpret her resignation, which is as unfair to the Alaskans who voted for her as it is to her political career. If Palin were packing it in due to the vicious treatment, why is she leaving the small stage of Alaska for the giant stage of national politics? Certainly the attacks will intensify once she departs public office for publicity. The irony here is that only by staying in Wasilla, a place far from the NYC-DC media corridor, could Palin hope to again bask in the political limelight.

Resume is the reason Richard Nixon was able to exact revenge on the Fourth Estate just six years after his "retirement" from politics. Resume is the reason Sarah Palin will not be able to exact similar revenge. Richard Nixon was a navy veteran, a congressman, a senator, and the vice president. Aside from a few lesser offices, Sarah Palin has been a governor for two-and-a-half years. (Alas, the media exacted revenge upon Nixon six years after his revenge upon them.) Palin, one senses, takes an if-you-can't-beat-'em-join-'em approach. Await Sarah the book, Sarah the lecture tour, Sarah the television show. But Sarah the President? Not anytime soon.

Sarah can have her media millions. She can have the Republican nomination. She can't have both.

On Friday, July 3, I will be filling in for Michele McPhee from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. on Boston's Talk Evolution 96.9 WTKK. Tune in to 96.9's strong FM signal in Boston and the surrounding environ. Outside New England? No problem. Click on listen live at their website to, well, listen live. So, information junkies, I ask you: what shall I talk about this Friday night?