on what is perfectly obvious?

Male fundamentalist Muslims, polygamist Mormons, and a substantial majority of fundamentalist evangelicals and NASCAR rednecks, are the biggest collection of girly-men this side of a Castro Street bath house.

Why else would they be so terrified of a sexually level playing field?

In the present Army, speaking fluent Arabic is not just the equivalent of running the 40 under 4.0, the mile under 5:00, and bench pressing 600 pounds, but more valuable.

It is offensive that our national discourse has been dominated so long by dummies.

than every 4 days during 2006 so far, we have added a net million humans (births minus deaths) to the surface of the earth, with no idea where the children are going to find potable water to drink before they die.

It's time to bring back the Polack jokes. And apply them to a bunch of the current posters.

The scientific, technological revolution that started a couple of centuries ago (think Newton) is turning out to be an evolutionary dead end. In our Homo sapiens need to breed and to use cheap, abundant food to get personally obese, we have killed off more of God's species than anything this side of an asteroid strike.

Every human reading this post can trace their DNA to the mitochondrial Eve who lived in eastern Africa around 200,000 years ago. We all came from Africa, and what we see in Africa now is what your children can expect if you do not get a grip on your need to breed.

Within a generation, the little East Asian boys will either settle for licking each other, of they will learn to value the female of the species. Adam Smith could have explained it.

the Chinese economy will develop a dirt-cheap meth methodology, and the Chinese government will insist that Chink-Meth be sold along with the fat bags of consumer goods at Sam's Clubs.

Withholding interest payments on the debt that the Republicans have run up this last quarter-century would be more devastating than all the volleys the British navy ever discharged.

this is one that was turned loose after a - relatively - short detention of three months, not that it didn't seem infinite to the victim.

How many more have been kept for how long and under what conditions, in our name and with our money?

The Net won't confirm this morning whether it was Jefferson or Adams who first said "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just," but it is something we all ought to be saying right now.

The first female presidential candidate nominated by one of the major parties, or the first black (who will inevitably be male), will be more symbolic to more Americans than the petals of a Georgia O'Keefe Calla lily.

The possibilities will surely create more distress than the subsequent reality.

The powerful always fear that, if they lose power, they will be treated as badly as they have treated the powerless, and their fear can make them desperate. Look at the parallel histories of Birmingham and Praetoria.

With all due respect to Kathleen, who made it to the front page, issues and their proposed solutions have always been with us, whether at the national level or the personal, and always will, and it certainly shouldn't matter who does the proposing if the solution works. Lise Meitner would be sainted in a rational society.

But for all of us, there can only be one first.

I'll bet you remember.