We have to give the shout out today to "The Wilderness Downtown,"an interactive online film by Chris Milk starring you. Here's the plot, you're on your way home -- back to the place where you grew up. All you need is the address and some good advice for that kid you used to be.

The Republicans and their new Tea Party friends have worked overtime during the 2010 election to give us enemies to hate, as they have for every election since 1968. 

But this cycle they have spawned an embarrassment of riches, so we need a prioritized list to ensure we hate the right people in the right order.

In first place, and coming on strong, should be Muslims. We don’t really need a reason to hate Muslims, as they’re mostly brown and black and wear funny clothes, but there’s always 9/11.

Tilting at Windmills

Unemployed new graduates are also dancing because they cannot find graduate jobs. They work as strippers because the pay is better than bar work and the hours mean they can attend interviews, training days or take further education courses.

Fair enough.

Economist Paul Krugman scoffs at political leaders, particularly President Barack Obama's secretary of the Treasury Department, Tim Geithner, for telling Americans that the economy is recovering when workers are clearly suffering high unemployment and continue to struggle with bad credit ratings and home foreclosures. Leaders are putting "smiley faces on a grim picture," Krugman writes in The New York Times, calling for more intervention to help workers: "This isn't a recovery, in any sense that matters... All of this is obvious. Yet policy-makers are in denial. Tim Geithner says, 'We're on the road to recovery.' No, we aren't."

The old saying that one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter comes to mind upon first glance of the latest document to be released by the controversial WikiLeaks website. While the three-page CIA document isn't as red-hot as the tens of thousands of pages WikiLeaks recently posted pertaining to Army operations in the Afghanistan war, the document may confirm the theories of more than a few political science geeks who believe that the proverbial carrot is better for foreign policy than the proverbial stick. The CIA report states that the United States could be viewed by some groups as an "exporter of terrorism" if it is too aggressive in its pursuit of radicals. If so, the perception could harm CIA operations abroad -- even result in the arrest of agency operatives.

After years of success and critical acclaim in films such as "Gladiator," "Hotel Rwanda," and "Walk the Line," Joaquin Phoenix famously announced in 2008 that he would retire from film so that he could focus on his rap career. It seemed the actor was having a nervous breakdown -- or was he? Phoenix is due to return to film next month in "I'm Still Here: The Lost Year of Joaquin Phoenix" and the critics are absolutely baffled. The main question: Was Phoenix's seeming breakdown the real thing captured on film by his brother-in-law, Casey Affleck? Or was the entire thing, from the time Phoenix announced his retirement from film, a grand hoax in the name of art?