And don't you understand that MOST people in America do NOT live in big metro cities surrounded by slick stuff.

The population of the United States is about 75% urban. So yes, most Americans do live in cities, whether "surrounded by slick stuff" or not. The typical American is not a farmer, rancher, etc. and hasn't been for a long time.

This is not to say any politician should ignore rural issues when campaigning or policymaking. Everyone, city or country, has to eat, after all. But I for one am getting pretty damn sick of (mostly rich, urban or suburban) Republicans using their pseudo-populist glorification of "real Americans" (which is always code for poor, rural, uneducated, and of course white as snow) to get votes from the people who actually suffer worst from their policies, and I sure don't want to hear my fellow Democrats parrot that rhetoric.

Obama will win by convincing all Americans to put aside their tribal differences -- rural vs. urban, rich vs. poor, young vs. old, white vs. black. vs. Hispanic vs. Asian etc., Christian vs. Muslim vs. Jewish vs. atheist vs. Hindu etc. -- and agree to vote for someone who work in everybody's interest. What's good for the North Dakota farmer is also good for the kid in the Atlanta ghetto. What harms the middle-aged businessman in a Denver suburb also harms the elderly retiree in southern Florida.

And anyone who can't figure this out, like the white rural voters who went en masse for Bush because he "lives on a ranch" and "seems like someone you'd want to have a beer with" -- even in 2004, when their kids were dying in disproportionate numbers in Iraq, and still are -- honestly is beyond hope.

Have you checked the Obama campaign's web site? It's chock-full of detailed policy proposals that, you know, wouldn't fit all that well into a 30-second commercial. The Obama campaign has been marked from the beginning (when, FWIW, I wasn't behind him -- I was an Edwards supporter then) by an unusual willingness to put forth serious discussion of policy that, if you bother to read them, go a long way toward counteracting the "empty suit" rhetoric. Personally, I'll be pretty happy to vote for a candidate who understands that serious policy is too complex a matter to be condensed into a sound bite.

I'm not going to bother trying to change our mind about Obama; your dislike for the guy is plain from the many ranting letters you've written about him. But I do feel obliged to correct your stereotyped view of "lily-white" Minnesota. Spend any time in or the Twin Cities metro and you'll see as much racial diversity as anywhere in the country.

You've never been in a war, have you?

Me, I distinctly remember working with my fellow medics in Desert Storm, male and female, covered in blood and shit and burned flesh up to our elbows, and not one of them fainting. I also remember a lot of tough guys, infantrymen, completely losing it the first time they saw a dead body.

Get back to playing your FPS games, little boy.

Very true. There is, however, plenty of evidence of significant vote fraud -- as in unaccountable electronic voting machines, manufactured by companies run by known associates of top Republican party officials, which return suspiciously pro-Republican results. It's a pity the Democrats seem to have decided this serious problem isn't worth talking about.

Climb the ladder on the backs of others, then throw down some crumbs once you reach the top. This strategy works more often than not, in terms of securing a reputation -- how many people today remember the absolute ruthlessness of Carnegie or Vanderbilt? But it's hard for me to believe that, no matter how much money, people like that give away, they'll ever make up for the damage they did in amassing their fortunes in the first place. Microsoft has done incalculable harm to the global economy. Without their monopoly in place, we'd all be richer, and the total money that would free up for small donations to worthy causes would dwarf any amount Gates can ever give away.

Not always ... but usually.

As women have moved into business, medicine, law, the sciences, the military, etc., we've seen over and over that they perform on average the same as men do. And yet it was claimed in every one of these fields that there was something inherent about women that made them unsuited for such work. (In the latter two cases, we're still hearing such claims, of course, though fortunately they're starting to diminish.) Over and over, the idea that women don't do X because they're less suited for doing X has been proven dead wrong. In retrospect, we can see that of course the reason there were (for example) so few female physicians a century ago was because of prejudice, not any inherent lack of capability.

So if women are underrepresented in a particular field today, yes, it might be that there's some inherent reason for that ... but historically, that's not the way to bet.