I go away for a few days...

...and suddenly the entire world goes mad.

Well, in truth, it was mad to begin with. But you have to step outside of blogland to see just how nutty it is.

I mean, can you believe the sheer ugliness of the "arguments" against Sotomayor? Dig:

This has prompted some Republicans to muse privately about whether Sotomayor is suggesting that distinctive Puerto Rican cuisine such as patitas de cerdo con garbanzo — pigs’ feet with chickpeas — would somehow, in some small way influence her verdicts from the bench.

Curt Levey, the executive director of the Committee for Justice, a conservative-leaning advocacy group, said he wasn’t certain whether Sotomayor had claimed her palate would color her view of legal facts but he said that President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee clearly touts her subjective approach to the law.

“It’s pretty disturbing,” said Levey.

And then we have this piece in National Review, which insists that the Spanish pronunciation of the name Sotomayor is "unnatural." Idiotically, the writer of that article dares to buttress his argument by bringing up the late Cathy Seipp. I knew Cathy back in college, and I can assure you that anyone who insisted on calling her Seep would have met with a volcanic response.

If these nonsensical anti-Sotomayor arguments do not constitute an appeal to racism, what does? What we are seeing here is not the pseudo-"racism" of the 2008 primary campaign, in which words were warped and meanings mangled and phonemes phragged by fanatics intent on reading invisible bigotries into innocent statements uttered by Bill or Hillary Clinton. No, this ain't that. Now we see what the real stuff looks like.

At this point, the Republican party should be looking for new blood. They should fish for converts among the disillusioned Dems betrayed by the primary battles. Instead, conservative snipers have reminded Clinton partisans of all the reasons why Republicanism is not an option.

At the same time, the Obots have chosen to remind us why the current manifestation of the Democratic party is also an unappealing option.

As all Drudge aficionados must know by now, Brenda Lee -- a bizarre self-proclaimed "Roman Catholic priestess" -- was roughly escorted away by the Secret Service after she tried to hand Barack Obama a piece of anti-gay marriage literature. Lee is a black woman. So is left-wing anti-Obama writer Cinie. Thus, our friends at Democratic Underground concluded that Lee and Cinie must be identical.

Hey, how many black women could there possibly be?

And never mind the fact that Cinie's most recent post uses heavy sarcasm to slam anyone who uses the Bible to justify an anti-gay position. You don't need to be a specialist in linguistics to understand that Brenda's plain see-Spot-run writing style bears no resemblance to Cinie's infectiously baroque way of wordsmithing.

The world is mad. Mad.

At least, blogworld is mad. Nevertheless, I am returning to it.

In case you are curious, my brief recess was devoted to the earning of lucre. There may be another brief recess after June 1, although I will probably find some way to blog from the library. (This site was born in a library.)

Once again, I want to thank all those who donated, and I will thank you all personally as soon as my real life calms down a bit.

By the way: At the time I knew Cathy Seipp socially, my mother was dying of lung cancer. I never would have guessed that Cathy, who did not smoke, would one day face the same foe. Before her death in 2007, Cathy wrote about the strange increase in lung cancer cases among non-smokers.

One possible culprit may be the American diet, which leads to severe heartburn, which leads to gastric reflux backing into the esophagus and lungs. I -- a-hem! -- have some experience of this.

Reflux can cause both adult-onset asthma and lung cancer. Actually -- and most do not realize this -- cancers are caused not by stomach acids but by bile, which comes from the liver and is alkaline. Stomach acids counteract this bile. Thus, the antacids we take to relieve heartburn may actually increase cancer risk.

When reflux seeps (not seipps) into the lungs, you wake up coughing violently, and your torched lungs make you feel as though you just escaped from the battle of Ypres. Since you have to spend the next hour or two upright, there's nothing for it but to get up and blog. (The time stamp of this very post may now be less mysterious to you.)

Although I doubt that reflux played a role in Cathy's cancer -- surely, she was too intelligent to maintain anything like my own abominable eating habits -- I do hope that more people understand that not all lung cancers originate in tobacco use. If only the bank bailout money could have been spent on cancer research...

Turning worm watch: This DU-er decries the Democratic party's betrayal of the left -- without once denouncing Obama by name. This guy -- who published some very ugly crap about the Clintons during the campaign -- now seems furious at Obama for the continuing Abu Ghraib photo cover-up. He references this piece by Larisa Alexandrovna, who talks about the homosexual rape of an underaged captive while Americans filmed.

Larisa does not mention (as I have) that the accused rapist's name is Adel Nakhla, and that he works for the ever-mysterious Titan corporation. If she starts writing about Titan, I'll be very impressed.

Larisa's commenters are calling Obama a "war criminal."

I broke off all relations with that woman in 2008, after she joined the Obot cult and allowed anti-Hillary calumnies to pepper her site. Of course, she will fervently deny that she ever was a cultist. She always has and always will.

I wish to hell that these people would just be honest about what they did. I wish that they would 'fess up to the role they played in foisting this nightmarish presidency on the world. I wish to hell that they would apologize.