For whatever it is worth, the opposite of "ordinary" is not "beautiful," it is "extraordinary." This matters in this sense: beauty and ordinariness are only different superficially. Extraordinary implies something more profound and beneath the surface.

TV hospitals provide a beautiful but superficial service -- the diagnosis and treatment of rare disease. Brillant problem solving may be intellectually impressive (beautiful), but it is superficial because it is not the brunt of real-world medical work. It is not what healing people is all about. Real hospitals provide the more extraordinary service, that is, treatment of common diseases and common people. A garden variety heart attack is too mundane for an episode of "House," but precisely because it is ordinary, it requires extraordinary care by medical people who realize that a common disease is not common at all to the person who suffers from it.

As a doctor, I can tell you that it is the nursing staff and not the doctors that make a hospital extraordinary. An average doctor (I consider my abilities average) can become an excellent one if the nursing is excellent. Nurses are my eyes and ears when I am gone; if they hear well and see much then I know everything. If they are blind and deaf I know nothing.

A doctor and the nursing staff is like a conductor and an orchestra. A brilliant orchestra can make even the sorriest conductor look like a genius. But no matter how good the conductor is, he or she cannot coax brilliance out of an orchestra that does not have the talent to provide it.

AI's goals, up to now, have been lauditory, I have supported them. So why would it embark on such a controversial move. All this will do is envoke the ire of those of us who are liberal enough to want to protect the rights of oppressed people abroad, but to conservative to sign off on plans to liberalize abortion.

When you conflate issues like this, you also consolidate your detractors. I don't understand why people can't be more ecumenical. Just leave the issue alone. There are plenty of other injustices in the world to be concerned about.

Of course not. Feminism is one of the pillars of the left. The left would blow apart if it made it its business to objectify women. The right, on the other hand, is prepared to oppress women, and objectifying them is perfectly all right by their ethos.

All of these sirens are all about sex, all the time. When Marsden puts down foreigners, for example, she is taking on the role of trophy wife. A trophy wife is a way for an insecure man to gain status. Husbands love it when their trophy wives treat others with scorn; it is a way for them to bask in vicarious beauty. The husband watches his woman treat someone like dirt, and then takes her home and screws her. He dominates her by objectifying her; she dominates everyone else.

Marsden, and Coulter, et. al., are high school mean girls grown up into trophy wives. The GOP will always marry such women because it enjoys watching them down people it would never have the gall to insult itself.

I bothers me a little that the GOP and the Democratic party are so institutionalized that they appear to be as permanent as the government itself. Political parties should die out periodically, with new, healthier ones with fresh visions taking their place.

I don't think the GOP will die, but it will be wounded for awhile. I wish one of the major parties would be replaced with something new. We could use that kind of upheaval in the U.S. -- a reminder that politics is about change, not about permanent consolidation of power.

Rove's, and the GOP's great mistake was that they were audacious enough to think power can be consolidated permanently.

I lost my house to Hurricane Katrina and blame Bush for what happened in New Orleans, but given all I have been through, no article about excesses of the Bush administration has outraged me as much as this one.

I guess we should not be surprised that an administration used to crossing lines of decency and ethics would cross another one, but I am a praciticing physician and take particular offense at the idea that medical records would ever be tampered with for political gain.

Downgrading a medical report can have serious repercussions for a soldier. Years down the road, when the soldier is out of service, he may have difficulty getting access to health care or getting disability because his war injuries are not properly documented. Remember, we live in an age when the term "pre-existing condition" has huge financial implications. What is a soldier to do if, ten years from now, he is suffering from complications of his service-related injury and he cannot work? If the injuries are not properly documented, how will he prove his case?

Medical records are sacred and their accuracy is critical to their usefulness. I would be infuriated if anyone ever instructed me to alter my medical findings for any reason. This abuse is far more serious and a much greater threat to proper medical care for the troops than the Walter Reed flap ever could be.