By all appearances, our guy Jesse Ventura only has to clear his throat to be invited on damn near every talk show in the country. I mean, good lord, he's out there again flogging the paperback release of last year's book! But, like Ann Coulter (only better looking), Ventura is such guaranteed good copy, a font of such reliable, juice-injected sound bites that The View and Fox & Friends, and, even his nitwitness, Sean Hannity, would book him if they heard he was signing a credit card tab at the last Blarney Stone in Manhattan.

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There was a graduation in LambertLand this past weekend. Son #2, AKA Weasel #2, picked up his diploma after enduring a pablum-marinaded commencement speech apparently written for a group of fourth graders but mistakenly delivered to several hundred 22-year-old adults just finishing four years of training in critical thinking. But I digress. The inflow of relatives—can you say four runs to MSP International in one day?—plus all the fine (backyard) dining cut into my bloviating time. So much so that that bastard, what's his name Rich at The New York Times, anticipated my latest deep thought.

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There are times—fifteen to twenty of them a day—when I'm convinced the great fight of our time is not between radical Islam and the free and democratic West (or as I usually see it, their nut-bag religious zealots against our nut-bag religious zealots). Nor is it between socialism and capitalism or Pepsi and Coke. The real front lines are over where the combined forces of stupidity and laziness are aligned against consumers of science, empirical knowledge, and practicing skeptics.

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I hope Barack Obama isn't wasting as much of his day with commercial news as I am, but the juvenile compulsions of America's news-for-profit industry has to be on his mind as he finesses his way through demands for special prosecutors and trials of former Bush administrators over what is so clearly torture. You could see him picking his way through the minefield today in his five-minute answer to a question about prosecutions in the Oval Office with the King of Jordan sitting by, like a potted plant.

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Perhaps you've heard of the hapless Denver TV executive who, in a spasm of misbegotten hipness, re-branded his station "The Deuce" without bothering to consult The Urban Dictionary . . . or, I'm guessing, listen to anyone who had. Presented with the street-reality definition of "the deuce," the GM—yet another balding white guy running a teenage girl-targeted CW affiliate—insisted he couldn't care less. He was, like, down with it, dude.

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What can you say about the carping that Obama has been on TV "too much?" 60 Minutes, Jay Leno, ESPN, a prime-time press conference, Bob Schieffer, an online town hall, and his Afghanistan policy all in one week. A guest spot on The Simpsons can't be far off.

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So I'm strolling the aisles of my favorite high-end boutique retailer  .. . Costco . . . the other day, and I spy a dozen or so DVDs of the 2001 BBC production of Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now, which I remember reviewing way back when. A tale of social-climbing, pretense, greed, and financial fraud on an epic scale, the film was damn good fun. Eight years ago, of course, we could all sit in our over-leveraged McMansions with our three leased SUVs, planning spring break in Biarritz, and laugh at those silly Brits of the 1870s.

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Our girl Michelle is obviously making the familiar calculation that there really is no such thing as too much, too far, or excess when it comes to rallying the Republican Party's activist base. Her line about getting "armed and dangerous" in opposition to President Obama's carbon tax—a little straight-from-the-hip shootin' delivered on John "Powerline" Hinderaker's The Patriot 1280 radio show this weekend—was another example of where conservative leadership is in the country today, post two lost duels at the ballot box.

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You know a strange wind is blowing across the moor when Neal Conan . . . Neal Conan! . . . via his normally decorous NPR program, Talk of the Nation, is soliciting the rage of the populace like he was on Thursday afternoon. The topic, of course, were those AIG bonuses, that one-tenth of one percent of the real load of dough that has set off every niche, corner, and pitchfork of the media and citizenry.
 

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Talk about appointment TV. After a week of shelling, the S.S. Jim Cramer floats in to Jon Stewart's studio tonight (taped this afternoon) to either plead for and establish a truce or take one last, fatal blast through the midship.

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