Yes, new moms can be inane, a constant stream of infant talk is boring, kids poop, doting parents spoil their offspring, and showing off your frozen breast milk can really kill a conversation. On all these things, this mom agrees with Elisa Gonzales Clark. Even parents can only put up with so much of this before desperately changing the subject.

However, where we part company is on Clark's view of friendship, which seems kind of selfish. She doesn't want to meet her friends halfway, despite the enormous changes in their lives. She resents her friends' responsibilities towards their families and wishes they were all childless and free again so they could escape to Hawaii and flirt with a transvestite Johnny Depp in a mosh pit or something. Her friendships seem to be all about her needs and her pleasure, not about her bonds with others.

To endure, a friendship requires empathy, supportiveness, and the realization that its very nature may change over time. Friendships end, too. Sometimes children kill a friendship, and sometimes it's marriage, or moving, or illness, or a million other things. And sometimes friendships ebb and flow with time. It's best to let them run their course without resentment. Who knows when an old friend might breeze back into your life? (It happened to me yesterday!)

Anyhow, if Clark really wanted to retain her new-mom friends, she wouldn't have dissed them so publicly in the San Francisco Chronicle. That in itself speaks volumes about her strange concept of friendship.

... from the danger of tofu!

The crimes seem very similar. Both involve multiple female victims. Victims in both cases were prostitutes. Some of the women in both cases were strangled. Ongoing investigations are having a hard time narrowing the search for the killer. Identical comparisons are made between the murderer and Jack the Ripper.

About the only difference is that there have been some attempts to humanize the victims of the Atlatic City murders. (I can't recall any of them being referred to by their hair color, for instance.) Other than that, both are examples of how crimes against women are sensationalized by the news media.

Unfortunately, this kind of crime is all too common. And pointing out the parallels in these cases is hardly frivolous; they are tragic in their similarities and the lack of traction in their investigations.

Publicizing crimes against women is fine. I'm all for shining a light in dark places. But dwelling lovingly on their sensationalistic aspects is another story. Look at the coverage of Laci Peterson's, Nicole Brown Simpson's and Jon Benet Ramsay's murders and Natalee Holloway's disappearance. Did it shed more light on these tragedies, or bathe the nation in bathos and sleaze to juice the ratings?

Normally I enjoy Salon's lighter, gossip-oriented articles. But this one left me scratching my head. Exactly how is Perez Hilton significant? He sounds like yet another attention-craving bottom feeder. And the best way to deal with this species is to starve it of what it most desires.

... if we're letting excellent recruits like Fadwa Hamdan slip through the cracks.

If he can't accept your past and refuses to forgive you, you're better off without him. Don't regret being honest! You're lucky he showed his true colors before you got married. Some other thing would have set him off even if he never found out about that particular incident.

Break it off now, and count yourself fortunate that lawyers and children are not involved.

Although as an ex-IBMer I have some beefs with the company, I was (and remain) favorably impressed at how many women were in managerial and executive positions.

But it's true that smart, enterprising, ambitious women usually do better starting their own companies. There's a direct payoff for all the hard work they put in and they have more freedom to exercise their talents and initiative without having to work around the "good old boys" network.

Those who imagine that these things are recent developments are woefully uninformed about history. Our supposedly more moral ancestors were busy as beavers having sex outside of marriage, having homosexual sex, having abortions and spreading STDs. (It may come as a surprise to many people that AIDS was not the first lethal STD. Syphilis killed its victims within a few months when it was first introduced into Europe and only later evolved into a milder but still ultimatly fatal form; it wasn't curable until the development of penicillin.) However, these things weren't openly talked about in polite society. As a result, the problems they caused ran rampant.

What changed in the late 20th century was that Western society became more open about these things. Instead of denying or concealing them, people discussed them and came up with ways to deal with them rationally and mitigate the problems that they caused.

Given the law of unintended consequences, these new sexual freedoms were not without their own problems. Also, they disturbed conservatives and authoritarians to no end. The current backlash against women's rights, gay rights, legalized abortion, treatment of STDs, and any forms of sexuality not involving married people in the male-superior missionary position is the result. (A backlash we can see being played out in Salon's letters column!)

They can't pin anything on Obama except his name. Thinking people will rightfully recognize this as bullshit -- but then again, the right-wing bottom feeders aren't appealing to thinking people. They want to elicit a gut reaction from the non-thinkers and the ignorant.

And this is just the beginning of a campaign season of lies, smears, and insinuations, so Obama had better watch his back.