SHOUT TO MY PEEPS: If there's a way to do it "low-maintenance," I've got to figure out how to add a comments/discussion feature to this thing. Anyone in the Blogger community who's got one going -- any suggestions?

Meanwhile -- as I will remain pretty much "off the program" until the end of the holidays -- here's a few bits of old business from the Mind Over What Matters mailbag:

Regarding my internal struggle between liberal values and conservative ethics, my Interlac amigo Chris Brown remarks: I'm reminded of something that Garry Shandling once said, "I'm conservative on some issues and liberal on others. I've never burned a flag -- but I've never put one out either."

Reader Chad Orzel comments, more specifically: Don't allow disgust over the duplicity of some left-wingers to blind you to the equal duplicity of the right wing. It's not in the immediate interest of either party to actually tell you the truth, and both right and left play the same how-to-lie-with-statistics games in their rhetoric. The only thing conservatives have over liberals at present is better PR (an amusing irony, given the rampant griping over "liberal media bias")