You spent a good portion of last year hammering away at the FISA issue and I recommended your column frequently. Your insights and research were important and not readily available elsewhere in the media. Most importantly, you were truly fair and balanced in your posting on the topic. The Constitution and our rights were under attack and you called out all the offenders; Republicans and Democrats; Executive and Legislative; Bush and Obama; Government and Business. There were many reason the FISA bill went through the way it did and I feel very well informed (if outraged) thanks to your coverage.

I wish I could praise your coverage of the conflict in Gaza the same way but I cannot. I gave you a chance but I'm yet to see a column that I would call fair. You are simply posting when you see a media outlet with a pro-Israel slant and call it biased, or an anti-Israel slant and praise it as fair coverage. Do I want to see bias revealed in your posts? Yes. Do I want to see posts that reveal all sides of an issue? Yes. But this issue is a complex one and your approach to it over these past few weeks seems simplistic. On FISA, you were hammering away at an issue and trying to make your readers aware that our rights were in jeopardy at the hands of government and large corporations. On the topic of Gaza, you are hammering away at an issue and trying to make the public aware that Israel has evil intentions. In the former case, you were blazing a trail. In the latter, you are simply adding fuel to a fire that is burning throughout the world with or without your blog. Please, apply your considerable talents elsewhere.

Over half a century, Israel has tried multiple approaches to handling the Palestinian issue. There are plenty of reasons to criticize many of those approaches, as there has been so much suffering and bloodshed and particularly because there has been so little progress. But, short of giving in to every Palestinian/Fatah/Hamas/Hezbollah demand, it is unclear what Israel on its own can do to halt the cycle of violence, particularly when more than one of the above mentioned groups are at their strongest and most popular when their demands call for the violent destruction of Israel.

It's nice to hear that the credit markets are thawing but I'd like to share a very recent experience that scares the crap out of me.

Yesterday I was comparing price quotes from rental car companies for a family vacation that I'm taking two weeks from today. Two of the major rental companies I researched offered me discounts for paying now as opposed to when I actually rented the car. One offered a 10% discount and the other offered 20%. 20%! This is crazy. They need the cash so badly that they are willing to give up 20% in order to get my cash two weeks earlier. This seems like desperation to me. Of course, I didn't take either deal...I'm concerned that these companies might not last the two weeks and I'd be stuck at the airport with no cash and no car.

Nice to see that some Salon readers actually think. This country suffers because we are constantly asked to put people and their ideas into buckets. This is one of the many curses of our two party system and a media (Forbes: Guilty, Salon: Guilty?) that wants to dumb down the complexity of the world. It's easier to publish lists of The Top 25 ________ than it is to publish an intelligent, thoughtful and well researched piece of journalism. It is a credit to the country that there are so many contradictions in trying to develop a list like this. Thank you d.c.eric for pointing out Pat Buchanan's opposition to the war in Iraq. This may not qualify him as a liberal but it's the start of an important discussion that we'll never get to have until Forbes and, yes, Salon start treating us like grownups.

I'm saddened that the Salon readership gave you such a hard time. I expect more from us.

In a disturbing trend, Salon is moving more and more towards "noise" media. Columns that appeal to us as thinking beings (Ask the Pilot, Ask Pablo, I Like to Watch, King Kaufman) receive less emphasis (through limited publication, reduced publication or terminated publication), while Salon puts more and more emphasis on columns that appear to our passions and angers (Greenwald, Walsh, some of Broadsheet). I wish Salon were doing the opposite and really promoting the columns/columnists that have no apparent agenda other than to inform, educate and entertain.

I guess the flaw with your column last week was that you failed to tell readers that they should feel really great about the world or really terrible about the world. I, for one, am glad that all you did was tell me about the world, allowing me to decide how I should feel about it.