... why should we be tolerant of those who have shown themselves, over and over again, to be intolerant of everybody else?

It is not intolerance to be condescending when speaking about fanatics who wrap themselves in the flag while trashing every value that America is built on. These American Taliban have gained control of far too much of our government, economy, and culture already. 2008 will be their chance to solidify their power still further (does anyone really believe there will be such a thing as a "swing vote" in the Supreme Court if a Republican President has the chance to appoint another Justice or two?) unless America wakes up and defends itself from the threat within, which is far more dangerous than any foreign threat has been since the end World War Two. The only danger in condescension is that it might mean we're not taking them seriously enough.

I'm assuming from your letter that you're a Christian. Please understand this: criticism of the religious right is not criticism of your faith. It is criticism of the people who have twisted your faith into a monstrous tool for power, in the world and most definitely of it.

Craig pled guilty, presumably under oath. Now he's saying he wasn't guilty. Sounds like a pretty clear-cut case of perjury to me.

Hmmm, don't I remember a big case a while back involving another political figure ... something about the Senate meeting to decide if someone was guilty of perjury ... "it's not the sex, it's the lying under oath" ... big scandal ... or was I just imagining that?

It may be that those companies with more female board members are "more in touch with their customer base," but I suspect that the explanation is simpler: when a company has more women on its board (and in other positions of authority) this is a sign that it's less discriminatory in general, and more concerned about ability than about non-merit factors such as sex. Giving women a fair shot doubles the available talent pool, so naturally the company will end up with more good people.

That was supposed to be "cause and effect" above, of course, although I suppose it works as is too ...

Is "priceless" equivalent to "worthless" to an economist? Like if one can't estimate the value of something, does it then have no value?

Yes. Which is one reason economics, no matter how hard it's tried to turn itself into an actual science, has about as much value as reading the guts of a sacrificial goat when it comes to predicting how economies will behave in the real world. Economists stubbornly refuse to recognize that price and value not only aren't the same thing, they have at best a tenuous relationship to each other, and a great many of the things people value most don't fit into that framework at all.

Can you cite me the line where Clark-Flory claims causation? Better yet, can you give definitions of "correlation" and "causation" that make any sense at all? Because as a biostatistician, I'm betting that I have a better grasp of those terms than you do, and your letter leads me to conclude with near-certainty that you have no idea what you're talking about.

Read down the list, and most of the really big spenders have the word "Foundation" in their names. Foundation adter foundation after foundation, giving money to the, yes, William J. Clinton Foundation.

Usually when you think of a "foundation" giving money away, it's to actually, you know, do something. Grants for medical research, for feeding the hungry, for improving schools, that kind of thing. And a lot of people write checks to the Such-And-Such Foundation assuming that their money will be used for such good causes.

Are they all just shuffling money around? And how much of that money disappears in administrative costs, every time one foundation gives another foundation a big chunk of change? Perhaps I should found the Foundation Foundation. "Give us money to feed the poor, starving foundations of the world! Don't worry about the specifics; we'll take care of it. You can trust us -- we're a Foundation!"

... I think you may have misinterpreted my letter. I wasn't saying nasty things specifically about the WJCF or the Clintons themselves. What I was going after was the odd spectacle of large, rich charitable foundations giving money to each other rather than the causes they were established to support. And it's fair to ask how much money gets absorbed by administrative costs in such transfers -- if there's one lesson to be learned from the modern economy, it's that any time there's an opportunity for a middleman to skim something off the top, someone will appear to fill that role.

It's a legal product. If you think it shouldn't be, lobby Congress to ban it. (Good luck with that one.) But for now, it's legal, and legal to advertise. Is it bad for you? Of course. So is fast food. So are SUV's, which probably represent more of a public health threat than cigarettes at this point. So are absurd clothes that require starvation and surgery to wear, and which magazines like the ones mentioned push like heroin. Singling out one product as so Eeevil that magazines should refuse to carry ads for it is absurd.