AUSTIN, Texas -- I'm sorry, but every now and again a girl just finds it necessary to lay her head down on the table and howl with laughter. I wrote a column warning that USA Next, a Republican Astroturf (meaning "fake grass-roots") group was going to attack the AARP. The senior citizens' lobby does not support the privatization of Social Security, and so clearly incurs the wrath of all God-fearing, true-believing, highly paid Republican public relations firms. But I have to confess, even I did not see this one coming.

You may not believe it, but I swear it is true: USA Next's first salvo was to accuse the geezer lobby of being against our troops in Iraq and in favor of homosexual marriage.

No joke, what journalist-blogger Josh Marshall calls "the fogey-bund" stands accused of being anti-soldier and pro-gay-knot-tying. A charming Internet ad shows a muscular hero of the desert in combat fatigues with a big X across his picture, and on the other side are two guys in tuxedos getting hitched with a big check across their picture. Under these two pictures, it says, "The REAL AARP Agenda."

On the night of November 1, 2004, Jim Branscome said, he overheard a man, a guest in the Holiday Inn where Mr. Branscome worked in Columbus, Ohio, tell someone over the pay phone in the hotel lobby:

"'Look, I know you got out of prison about'...X amount of months ago...I can't remember how many months he gave, but it was earlier this year, the year 2004, and he said, 'It's illegal for you to vote in this state, and if you show up tomorrow at the polls, we're going to have the FBI there waiting for you, and we're going to haul your ass right back into the slammer' he told him or into the 'can' or something like that."
-- From a videotaped interview with Robert Fitrakis and Linda Byrket.

Mr. Branscome said that the man appeared to be making calls from a list of names and phone numbers. Outraged at what he had heard, Mr. Branscome said, he approached the man, but the man got on the elevator and fled to the sixth floor where he had a room. Mr. Branscome followed him to the sixth floor, but the man returned to the lobby immediately, with Mr. Branscome following him down and out of the

Thanks for article on SS privatization. I'd been thinking lately along the same lines, but would characterize it perhaps a little more cynically. As an MBA I've studied the market [primarily in the early 90s]: Technical analysis was rapidly replacing fundamental analysis. The market had become psychological. Now with the DOW at 10,000--the fundamentals of the US economy doubtful--the huge impact of the so-called Plunge Team [officially goes by another name] and with the many mysterious accounting reforms--the market is adrift in artificiality. It is a pyramid waiting to fall. There is only one thing to keep it afloat [as all of the excess funds available to prop it up have been "invested"] and we're talking about the need for a whole lot of money. And so we have privatization of SS. I don't think it's as much about another bull market as it is about another round of large-scale Ponzi capitalism. It's SS injection or people start to poke around, determine that there is really nothing fundamental supporting the PE ratios and the whole thing takes a nosedive. It's find a new source of funds or go home. It's about pushing the US community further out into deeper water.

I guess I can call myself one of the Dylan generation since, at 63, I'm the same age as him, but the prose stylists that allured an Anglo-Irish lad hopelessly strapped into the corsets of Latinate gentility were always those of American rough-housers: first, in the mid-fifties, Jack Kerouac, then Edward Abbey, then Hunter Thompson.

Thank God I never tried to imitate any of them. Thompson probably spawned more bad prose than anyone since Hemingway, but they all taught me that at its most rapturous, its most outraged, its most exultant, American prose can let go and teach you to let go, to embrace the vastness, the richness, the beauty and the grotesqueries of America in all its thousand landscapes.