Try going through an issue of the San Francisco Bay Guardian, one of those ad-filled freebie papers you can pick up in little boxes by the street. The true home of the San Francisco Left--and by God you haven't seen a leftist until you've seen a San Francisco leftist*--they are still fighting battles and holding positions that were starting to smell back when I was in college.

Current hot issues include

- Teri Barr, the late Earth Firster who got her rear end blown loose by a pipe bomb in her car ten years ago.

- Indignation over calling an express train between San Jose and San Francisco by the gun-glorifying name of "Baby Bullet."

- Delirious joy over the financial problems of the Edison School company, which attempted to privatize some failing schools, and has been a prime target of the local Left since day one. Like the Left's response to Enron's collapse, this situation is seen as an unmistakable sign, not just that Edison might have screwed up, but that capitalism as a whole is an utter failure at anything it attempts (compared to the glorious record of world socialism).

- And, of course, the sixty pages dedicated to the proposition that one should not only have sex with pretty much anyone or anything that breathes, but with anything that has a measurable mass in the time/space continuum.

I can raise my blood pressure ten points just reading the cover of one of these rags.

*The kind that never blink, and shout leftist talking points at you at the tops of their voices until you have little specks of foam on the front of your shirt. Their brains behave exactly as though someone shot 900 volts through them every morning. I have yet to see their like on this board, thank God. The closest thing on TV to one of them would be James Carville if you gave him a light lobotomy.