Since just about everyone but Kirkman has chimed in with testimonials to this site and, now, last-minute "hey, shoot!, we still ON?" posts, I'd just like to know... where do you think we'll go? What do you think will happen to us?

...And I'm putting these questions to you, Josh Marshall.

Do you think we'll just... fade away? Into the night? Forgotten, forsaken and dispossessed?

Admit it: You wanted to dump us because we were getting too close to your participation in the 9/11 hologram coverup - right? I knew it!

That's confirmantion of the old saw, in case we needed it: We can't trust anyone.

Oh... you've got your news and your cocktail parties and your orgies with fat hookers at the Watergate. The whole, messy Washington, DC, fleshpot spread before you. Corrupt, horney, rightwing. Wide stance... Ask yourself, though... What do your faithful, lapdoggie reader bloggers have?

I'll tell you. We've got letters to mom and "Cheaters" reruns. That's about it. And mom doesn't give a damn about our opinions on unemployment, about our endless sanctimony about fascist Tea Partiers.

And, besides, in my case, mom's deader than Rick Lazio.

You're unplugging our delusional insights, Mr. Marshall. I hope that makes you happy.

...Maybe as happy as successfully hushing up your extensive criminal record? The smuggling charges, perhaps? The pimping rap you took the fall for?

Youthful indiscretion, I suppose.

How about those long-lost, hidden-away illegitimate children with LaToya and Anna Nicole? Who's paying for their pacifiers and Developing World nannies? Donald Trump?

But I'm not going to turn into a pumpkin at midnight. Not me. Right now, I'm taking my mindless chatter and psycho diatribes over to thoroughly invisible Blogger.com until I can launch my own site. You can see it at AMERICAN CARRION, if you can contain your mocking laughter long enough!

I'm gonna keep my little balls rolling.

And maybe run you right outta Cyber Town!

Seems there are a few moments of margin until the reader-blog goes dead, so I'm going to chime in with one more:

Are we to believe the GOP has a brilliant formula for ending the recession? If it is a double-dip meltdown, won't Republicans be blamed for the second installment if they take control of the House of Representatives this year. Won't they take the political hit in 2012?

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Backyard grillin' in the summertime is more than garlic bread and smoky meat. It's Americans' ephemeral dip in our primal soup - free from credit fees, celebrities' teachable moments, and silly Middle Eastern fairy tales. We eat with our hands out in the open. We throw scraps to our animals and lick clean our paper plates. Table manners are faraway fables, once faintly treasured, now rejected.

We become, again, savages... If not particularly noble ones.

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Americans across the political spectrum supported the use of force against those who attacked us on 9/11. Now, as we approach our 10th year of combat in Afghanistan, there are those who are understandably asking tough questions about our mission there. But we must never lose sight of what's at stake. As we speak, al Qaeda continues to plot against us, and its leadership remains anchored in the border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan. We will disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda, while preventing Afghanistan from again serving as a base for terrorists.

- President Barack Obama, Aug. 31, 2010

Aside from the whiney excuse "we all wanted revenge for 9/11, so don't blame us politicians for these stupid wars", there's a key problem with this explanation for our continued presence in Afghanistan - or Iraq, for that matter:

There's no reason to assume al Qaeda is still in the wild tribal territories of the Afghan/Pakistan frontiers. Its terrorist leadership could be anywhere, just as the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon Sept. 11, 2001 were plotted by al Qaeda operatives in Malaysia, Yemen and the United States itself. Not Afghanistan. And not, as we discovered too late, in Iraq.

Yet 9/11 has become the blood flag waved every time our Mideast quagmires are doubted, every time someone questions expanding the conflagration. ...To Iran, maybe.

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Apparently, we're so desperate, so willing to grasp any thin straw of hope, we entertain notions that in what would be his 75th year, Elvis is back to save the economy.

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Despite what President Obama says tonight, the Iraq War isn't over and we're not about to withdraw. We've built an embassy complex there that's bigger than Vatican City - if that's profane enough for you - and this country, our government, intend to stay in Iraq forever.

...If not longer.

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Is there any way you can give us a few days notice before you end the readers' blogs, so we can download and copy our vast libraries of diatribe on personal CD or disks? I actually have a few of which I'm proud (I realize I'm a minority of one here), and I'd like to pore over them on cold winter nights.

If anyone has requested this already, I apologize, and I'd love to know what the response is... and any procedures on how to accomplish this.

Also, I realize it's infuriating to have us faceless hysterics, given the privilege of pouring out our opinions, worldviews and paranoid delusions, start assuming we own this site and can tell you what to do. There is, at every blog, an almost instant "community" that appears and becomes wildly territorial without an inch of ground to stand on. It's like hearing from your least favorite relatives, day in day out.

Frankly, I don't know how you've managed to store all this material. My own ravings number more than 300 (last time I counted). Multiply that by dozens, if not hundreds, and you've got huge globs of bandwidth shot in the ass.

I've chided TPM a bit - especially commenting on Muckraker - but I've always appreciated this site. And, yes, I enjoy the company of reader-bloggers/commenters who always show up and butt in with their own, sometimes perverse, two cents. Even in scatalogical battles with them, I always learn something - if I may cite a TIRED cliche.

If you decide to close it down, here's one curmudgeon who's appreciated the ride.

How about it? Remember: This is one of the very few times I've EVER used the idiotic term 'community'.

Nate Silver must be the cursed scourge of keno tables in Vegas. I'd like to haul him along to Mexican dog tracks. I'd win enough money in a week to chuck this piss-pot country and retire to the Cook Islands, where giggling, half-naked Polynesian girls could tie me up and whip me hard - HARD! - with razor-sharp palm fronds.

Silver, you see, can foretell the future. I know... it is exciting. He has an uncanny knack for picking winners in elections by crunching poll tallies, figures from past elections, diagnostic tables of Election-Day weather and likely personality quirks prevalent in geographic areas, then dividing the results by the number of times Mitch McConnell can be jabbed with a pin - and remain near-catatonic.

Two years ago, Silver tabbed Barack Obama the next President while everyone else was decrying our inability to overcome instilled racism, that Obama's campaign was fruitless from the beginning - a noble gesture that only would underline empty evil dwelling in our deepest little deepie soul pit blah, blah, tiresome blah.

Last night, Silver told Rachel Maddow the Democrats would lose six to seven seats in the Senate this week.

And I just can't bring myself to give a damn.

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There's a sun-worshiping cult among Southern California news anchors. Amid all the happy chatter interspersed among stories about drug cartel body dumps and Elin Nordegren Woods, we hear news anchors babble happily that the heat is BACK!

We've had a very mild summer so far out here on the Left Coast. Temperatures have been mostly in the 80s. In the valleys, which usually broil in the triple-digits, that low mercury has been welcome. Verrrrrry welcome.

...Everywhere, in fact, but perennially goose-bumped local news. I finally figured it out: Most of these highly paid feat puppets live at the beach. When it's mild everywhere else, thermometers drop to the 50s out there. Chilly. Can't butter up and bag some rays. But when temperatures are a comfortable 70s-80s on the sand - from Malibu up through Ventura to Big Sur - the marine layer has lifted, the low pressure has moved off, and the valleys bake at a searing 104-108.

It's a perception thing. And... a geography thing, too. And, yes, of course, a money thing. Pacific Palisades, cool in the fog, is very high-rent - if you can find a rental. TV news celebrity rich...

Perceptions vary, it's true. Take the Iraq drawdown that's suddenly a hot topic. Despite the fact we're leaving behind a foreign legion of about 50,000 troops, this partial pullout is nothing less than the end of the Iraq War to some interested observers. Finally, after seven and a half hellish years... Mission Accomplished:

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How can anyone, right now, with 10 percent unemployment hanging tough for the past couple years, think a sitcom called "Outsourced" would be funny?

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Why am I not surprised?

Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, publisher of the veeery embarrassing diplomatic and military emails about our darker deeds in Afghanistan, travels to Sweden, is accused of sexual assault - and then witnesses in curious wonder as authorities in the land of hot blondes and Ingmar Bergman drop the heinous charges against him.

All in a few hours. ...While the Wikileaks Scandal rages.

Hmmm. I got a case o' curious wonder, myself.

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I can't help it.

It's the closest I've been to seeing the world through Republican eyes, but I can't resist being as amused as a country club squire who LIVES to vote against school bonds and gets a rare boner whenever an egghead suggests - for the 126,000th time in 75 years - that Social Security is juuuust about kaput:

Democrats are hilarious!

Every election season we go through this. Stan shows up. Ollie arrives. The fresh cream pies are delivered on time. And Democrats try to get through a campaign season without dropping a banana peel and stepping on it.

Will the antics ever stop?!

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Someday, when both houses of Congress and the White House gather on the steps of the Capitol to ceremonially burn what's left of the ol', dry parchment that is our outdated, small-time Constitution, it's conceivable few outside the Beltway will take notice. The rest of America will be distracted and emotionally drained by more important issues - future versions of the "ground zero mosque", Blago and death panels.

Last night on the "Maddow" show, sub-host Chris Hayes and "Pat Tillman Story" director Amir Bar-Lev agreed the fabrications surrounding the death of the football player and military volunteer twisted the truth to meet the mood of a country blinded by nationalism and "jingoistic" fervor. Evidently, Bar-Lev's new film sets the record straight about a celebrity war casualty whose tragic end has become shorthand for all the lies about our endless crusades.

Not to show disrespect to Tillman and his family, however, I submit most of America isn't concerned with Pat Tillman as much as we are with the wars themselves. Tillman's death was a sidebar event that surely exposes government and military mendacity, but most of us out here in strip-mall America note the war that took his life is still raging, still killing. And it's not the only one.

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To: Barack Obama, President of the United States
From: A voice crying from the vast patchwork of senseless violence and ceaseless sunshine that IS the San Fernando Valley
Re: What the hell is going on here?

Look... Mr. President... Can I call you Barack?...

We're in trouble out here. Not just here in Los Angeles - and, by the way, I don't think it's news to you and the rest of the country that our trouble tends to be f*ckin' crazy.

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Congress' failure to rein in America's rapacious payday-loan industry left no doubt: Bloodsuckers are mighty popular this year.

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