I'm "guilty" of a long URL but I did check in FF to see that the long URL wasn't throwing the margins off.

Now, tinyurls certainly aren't friendly by definition. The objections to them can be summed up in the idea of lack of transparency (see RFC 1736 for the URL requirements).

1. A "long" -- whatever THAT may mean -- URL can be transparent to readers, if the URL is written to be human readable. A tiny URL, by contrast, is a string of gibberish.

2. A "long" URL can be transparent to readers, because the location of the URL is visible; the reader can decide whether to go to the site or not.

3. A "long" URL is transparent to search engines like Google, and to its users (for reasons #1 and #2 above), so they reward good behavior by increasing hits.

4. An finally, I don't see the sense in entrusting a key piece of functionality for what is, after all, an ongoing collective corpus of archival posts, to a URL remapping service. Why would I? If tinyurl ever goes down, 87 million links are going to break, and then we won't be able to do research on any of those links. How much sense does that make?

The real answer to "long" URLs is for Salon to upgrade their commenting software to either (a) break the URLs into shorter lines, (b) turn them into links, or (c) allow the A tag (incorporating such protections as need be). All these are well-known, workable solutions from the open source CMS world, and the Salon admins can surely incorporate them here.

I don't see any reason to encourage the use of a poor solution, especially for cosmetic, layout, purposes, when real solutions exist.

NOTE Oh, I just went to the tinyurl and found that they're somehow sucking down my Amazon account (cookies, or whatever) to "greet" me. Not cool at all.

Reading the newest first. Just wow...

You wrote "Republican Party," but I think you meant to write "Republican Partei," right?

In truth, the pack-like mentality and brutal ignorance of The Base was fully on display both during the 2004 campaign and the subsequent Social Security bamboozlepalooza, where only declared Bush supporters were deemed worthy to approach The Presence, and all other citizens were excluded (and thrown out and/or roughed up if they managed to make their way in).

And the 28% will not going to be able to undrink the KoolAid. So we'll be dealing with these people for quite some time, no matter which Leader they end up fixing on this time around.

If I haven't said it once, I'll say it again:

Gitmo holds 500 prisoners max.

Estimates of prisoners held secretly range from 8,000 to 35,000 (with the estimate from Colin Powell's chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, at the high end).

So, 35,000 - 500 leaves 34,500 and 8,000 - 500 = 7,500.

Where are the bodies?

If they've been released, thousands of people with no reason to love us are being very, very silent.

If they're still in prison, the governments are being unusually silent, and a story of this size tends to leak one way or another.

If they've been disappeared.... Say, over the Atlantic.... Well, that would account for the silence, now wouldn't it?

Of course, we know "they would never do that"....

How do we prick the bubble of impunity?

You'd think he could just drive a truck through the loopholes.

But n-o-o-o-o!

I was going to go with a fine Corinthian leather riff--that stuff was made in Newark, just like Thompson's made in the Beltway--but this is so much more erect, er, direct. I meant direct!