I totally approve of this move. I'll admit that I couldn't resist reading the Fix while it was around -- but I always felt a little dirty afterwards. It's not that celebrity gossip is bad per se; it's that Salon just isn't the right place for it.

I would take this opportunity to suggest that Salon shouldn't be covering sports, either . . . but I enjoy King Kaufman's writing too much to do that.

Perhaps you can revive this feature when the Global War On Terror is concluded.

"Next up is a pill which will let men trade a year of life for an inch of penis length. It's expected to reduce the average male lifespan from 72 to 19."

I'll respond to this absurd analogy literally: if somebody wants to trade 53 years of his life for a slightly bigger penis, why not let him? It would reduce our country's skyrocketing medical expenses, and would weed out some of the dumbest members (yuk) of our herd.

Seriously, why must we be nannied by appointees of Platonic guardians like George W. Bush? Why can't competent adults be trusted to make these kinds of choices about their lives?

If there were a pill that would make me skinnier and enrich my sex life, I'd take it. Why not? To avoid forfeiting my moral superiority? (As it happens, I do enjoy being morally superior -- but not as much as I enjoy having great sex.)

When hectoring, knee-jerk anti-"medicalization" meshes with hectoring, knee-jerk feminism, the result is especially irritating and hypocritical.

To Tracy Clark-Flory, let me ask: are you opposed to letting "transgendered" persons sugically alter their sex organs? (Do you snicker about sex changes in Broadsheet?) That seems a rather extreme example of "medicalizing" a problem that has traditionally been "part of the human condition." I personally find sex change operations -- and tanning beds, and Botox -- baffling . . . but who the hell am I to judge how other people want to live their lives, so long as their weird choices don't harm me in some significant way?

"A die-hard Republican 'security mom' named Marylee McCallister expresses the disenchantment felt by so many. McCallister told the Washington Post last summer that she voted for Bush because she believed him when he said that John Kerry was weak on national security. '"I was dumb," she said. "Now, granted, they came here and rammed bombs into us, but I am afraid we have gotten into something full scale which perhaps did not have to be."'

I wouldn't get too excited about "repentant" Bush voters like Marylee. I know dozens of these guys. They were zealous McCarthyites three and four years ago, when it was cool. In 2004, when the country (and, indeed, the world) desperately needed them to develop some moral backbone, to show some character, they were "uncertain," and voted for Bush "with reluctance." Now, like grotesque children in adult bodies -- children who drive SUVs (!) -- they pout that they were "misled." Somehow, impossibly, they've held on to their moral outrage; they've just redirected it at Bush, as if Bush weren't their creation and their responsibility. (Bush is theirs as surely as Iraq is Bush's.)

And you know what? Marylee -- the heartbroken "diehard Republican" -- is still going to vote Republican in 2008. Mark my words. She'll find a new messiah -- "Like Jesus, but with violence!" -- in the form of Mitt Romney or Sam Brownback or Rudy Giuliani or John McCain.

The bottom line is: people like Marylee do not vote for pro-gay, feminist candidates . . . or candidates who believe that poor people have an absolute right to quality health care and a living wage, and a real education (vs. the nominal education our public schools currently provide, so that we can blame underprivileged kids for their failure to develop into investment bankers) . . . or candidates who favor a diplomatic, rather than a military, solution as a first, second, and twentieth resort. And those, sadly, are the kinds of candidates that the Democratic Party, even at its wishy-washiest, tends to nominate.

So: to hell with Marylee. It's convenient for us (and for her, oddly enough, since she's a part of the country that her party's been destroying) that she won't be denouncing us as traitors, or sympathizers, or craven defeatists, or godless heathens during this particular election cycle . . . but we've got to find a way to win, and govern, without pandering to people like her. When I see Hillary Clinton "talking tough" -- or Barack Obama "talking God" -- I wonder if we've learned the lesson. I hope so.

I know that what I've just said reveals me to be an "elitist," even though I grew up lower middle-class and am, myself, a product of public schools (straight up the line, from grade school to law school). I know that the #1 rule for progressives is that we're supposed to be polite to bigots and cruel religious zealots (and to the "social moderates" who merely tolerate bigotry and zealotry because of their profound selfishness, their insatiable desire to accumulate wealth).

Or it was the #1 rule, until last November.

Thank God, then, for the new wave of Democratic leaders, whose "internal polling" must have told them that their constituency wanted them to quit pandering to the fanatics and fight back. Thank God, also, for the terrible liberal websites like Salon.com -- which, in spite of its irritating obsession with Alec Baldwin, continues to publish articles that commit the crime for which the punditry is chastising Harry Reid: speaking the plain truth, without apology. (And you guys were doing it when McCarthyism was in!)

Oh: nice piece, by the way.

Her disses are always so carefully crafted. It's pleasant to remember that literacy and toughness aren't mutually exclusive.