I'm sorry, but Ann Coulter is not hot, in an Eva Braun or any other kind of way. Sombody needs to buy her a cheeseburger, with extra cheese.

I hate Christmas. It's a plot to encourage happy people to make fun of unhappy people, and flaunt their happiness, genuine or faked, and shove it in the faces of the unhappy. People are meaner around Christmas-time, not nicer. It's probably because of all that wretched music.

Someone once told me it didn't start out that way, but I'm suspicious.

On the other hand, Wil Wheaton is right about everything. I wish he could do a vulcan mind-meld on Bill O'Reilly, and mess his head up.

Most TV is still incredibly mediocre.

The new Battlestar Galactica is grossly overrated, and obliquely racist, or at least zenophobic. It makes me miss Lorne Greene, who wasn't either of those things.

The best new programming tends to be two-dimensional, surprisingly enough: if you want meaningful social and political commentary, the Cartoon Network, of all places, is where you'll find a lot of it. The cartoon commentary on reality TV("Drawn Together"), for example, is several leagues more clever than any "real" reality TV.

I hate to say it, but honor killings based on presumption are nothing new; this case just happened to make international headlines. Last month I mentioned a son who killed his mother in '95 simply because she wanted to remarry. Was there proof positive of the supposed dishonor in the each of the hundreds of other cases? I suspect the answer is no. The bottom line is prosecutors need to prosecute irrespective of the involved family's wishes.

I notice the article doesn't even mention the use of depleted uranium and its after-effects. The monetary legacy of DU will, in all likelihood, be at least two-fold: increased illness for American vets exposed to DU, but also increased illnesses for people living in Iraq. (to say nothing of increased incidences of birth defects for the children of persons in both groups.)

"Still, he dealt a permanent, if partial, setback to the expansionist and aggressive Likud Party. It is hard to imagine that even if it returned to power, the party could realistically hope to put colonists back into Gaza. Instead, the Hamas Party, a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, will almost certainly rule the strip."

Gaza was evacuated, in comparative peace. Even if Sharon has never been concerned with the best interests of the Palestineans, he demonstrated that the settlers are moveable. And the rest of them will be moved, and the wall will come down. Not tomorrow, but in this century.

"abetterfuture" says:

"It seems we now only have two wings of the Democratic Party, the newish wing of F. Roosevelt and Clinton and the traditional party of Andrew Jackson and Strom Thurmond whose successors have taken over the Republican party.

I was raised in the party of Lincoln, Grant, T. Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and Rockefeller and that party now seems dead."

I'm sorry, but

A. nobody alive today was raised on the party of Lincoln and Grant.

And,

B. you are wrong, frankly, to conflate FDR with Clinton. Clinton was a fairly typical moderate Southern Democrat, the protestations of the right-wing media notwithstanding.

Associating Bill Clinton, who said "the era of big government is over" with FDR is absurd. If anything, Clinton helped give licence to the breakup of the New Deal and the Great Society, with the deregulation of telecom and big media, which may well be why you seem to get your fuzzy-headed ideas about politics from the History Channel.

clearly you haven't had your fish sticks yet and you're feeling cranky. It will pass.

Cary Tennis is the only one who has it right. The west wing posits a happy, rational universe where well-meaning people will always win the day if they just wake up early enough and work really hard. The fact that there are still tons of people who identify with this ethos is why the democrats keep losing and losing. The show is offensive in its self-righteous prissiness in face of the nature of the enemy modern-day progressives have to face.

Like one of the other commenters, I wonder about the questioner's age and the nature of the school. 16 or 17, or 19 or 20? A public high school or a public university? Those factors make a big difference.

Nevertheless, I think I'd recommend to the young questioner 2 rather short reads: C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity and Bertrand Russell's essay Why I Am Not a Christian, in whichever order. Both are written at a level that is comprehensible by a reasonably intelligent teenager. I recognize that his choice isn't merely dualistic, Christian faith or no faith, but it's a start that I'd think he'd be more likely to grasp.