My first thought was conspiracy: the Bush Administration was not happy about that peace march, after all.

But my second thought was that the Bush Administration is made up of the same people who brought us the mess in Iraq and the botched disaster management in the Gulf States. It's Crony, Inc. -- these days they can't seem to organize a Supreme Court nomination!

My guess, from this article, is that it was a botched terrorist attack, and as with other early warnings received and ignored by this administration, this one will go under the rug, too. Reports warned of 9/11; they did nothing. We knew that Katrina was coming; the Administration seems to have been the last folks to notice it on CNN.

Karl Rove and Company are very, very good at things like "Swift Boat Veterans" -- they are very good at fooling some of the people some of the time. Dealing with terrorism, though, is not about managing perception and information; it requires discipline and the proper use of information. (For instance, it involves making good use of CIA operatives instead of busting them to reporters in an act of petty vengeance.)

It is time for right minded people to demand better leadership than this: we need more than speeches about "staying the course." We need a president willing to read and heed memos, willing to leave vacation for a hurricane, willing to admit that a threat is a threat, even if it isn't going to help his popularity.

And more than anything, we need to quit thinking in terms of "us" and "them" when we look at each other across the aisle. Republican or Democrat, Independent or Green, we're all going to be in a heap of trouble if we don't quit fussing with each other and start paying attention to the world.

Mr. Thompson's expressed dismay about being merely "an accident of nature" solved a mystery for me. Now I understand why folks get so darn upset about evolution: they are terrified of death, unless there is the guarantee of something beyond it.

News flash, Mr. Thompson: It's true that "if you die ... you'll change into something else." When someone dies, the body rots, the worms come, and before long, you're compost. If there is a noncorporeal component that endures (and science doesn't have anything to say about that, really, since "noncorporeal" is not in science's portfolio)that's fine and good, but the body rots.

Death is truly terrifying, the mystery to end all mysteries. For some people, faith is a way to deal with the terror, but for a few of those folks, it only works if it is unchallenged. That's sad.

I hope for Mr. Thompson's sake that he can someday find a faith that will stand up to the idea that not everyone agrees with him about Heaven and Hell. I hope that he finds out, someday, that there are lots of human beings who behave themselves not out of a terror of hellfire, but because they believe their behavior matters, not only on some account book in the sky, but in the greater scheme of, yes, creation.

Hurrah for Patrick Smith and his good sense!

Ever since I spent a year in Israel, airport security in the U.S. has made me completely nuts. So much worry over nailfiles! So little worry over much more serious issues.

The fact that we are still not screening ALL check in luggage for explosives is a whole lot scarier than a pocket screw driver. A terrorist on board a plane, armed with a sharpened bamboo knitting needle and a good plastic knife is going to face an entire planeload of enraged passengers. We can DO something about him, especially given the reinforced cockpit door. We are helpless to do anything about the explosives in someone's checked luggage.

Some of this, I think, has to do with imagination. It is easier for us to visualize the scenario aboard American Flight 11 because it has been described and dramatized a million times. We've never had the blow-by-blow descriptions of what happens when a bomb goes off in a plane (although probably the families of the victims aboard the TWA flight have been there in their nightmares). So we think that box cutters are scarier than a stash of plastic explosives.

Take a look at any of the photos on line of bombed buses, cars, etc. from Israel and from Iraq. Imagine that that is your airplane. Now realize that we STILL don't screen to prevent that on all our domestic airline flights. Realize that while we are paying people to harrass us about nail files in line at the airport, we somehow have left our container ports with haphazard coverage. Our public transit is wide open to troublemakers. You can carry just about any crazy thing on the BART train in the SF Bay Area, just don't ask to use the bathroom (those are closed, lest a terrorist use them.)

Thanks for your good sense, Mr. Smith. May it be catching.