Lizzi Miller is beautiful, though initially, that belly roll was a little harder to take.

My first, wrong, instinct was to post something snide and stupid.

Then I thought about my reaction, and read the cheering comments from the women who were inspired by Miller. And I read the warped comments from the other male posters on this thread.

And I thought about how my wife, who used to be a size 2, now has a belly just like that after giving birth to our daughter. And how I don't find her any less attractive because of it.

As a man, I feel like there are only rare moments when I understand how objectified and trivialized women are in our culture. Sexism is as automatic and natural for many men as breathing. Maybe my kids will have a healthier attitude about this. I wonder if I might have been born a little too late to see something like gender equality.

I'm sorry, it's a blind spot in most of us men. It's because we take it for granted that we have the right to objectify women. Very few of us would think of it that way, but that is in fact what we do when we can't look at a beautiful woman with a bit of belly fat with the same respect we can our own partners and wives.

I looked at the picture for a good solid minute while thinking of friends and ex-girlfriends who look a lot like her, suddenly all parts of her seemed beautiful, and her belly seemed cute. I guess I just needed a minute to get past my initial reaction.

I admire Michael Lind's confidence in second-guessing the President's gameplan - Evil Knievel should be so lucky as to have that kind of self-assurance.

Two of the brightest, most capable leaders of the past twenty years - Obama and Clinton - have barely been able to make headway on health care, despite having significant majorities in Congress and for what we can tell, their hearts in the right place.

But Michael Lind knows what to do. Surely, they faltered because they didn't read enough Machiavelli.

Or maybe, just maybe, it is just a little harder than it looks?

I know second-guessing Presidents is a venerable and cherished national pastime, but it may be worth asking - if Obama and Clinton can't do it, who can? Hillary? Howard Dean? Machiavelli?

Or perhaps, if we had President Clinton, Dean or de Medici self-destructing in front of our eyes right now, we'd be mooning about if only we had voted for the measured, brilliantly articulate Obama, everything would be different. Totally.

Being in a real relationship is tough, Mr. Lind. At first, during the courtship, his breath smells like peppermint and lavender, and his words are like a distant, beautiful Elysian melody. That's a really nice time. But then you start living together and find out he gets pizza breath and listens to Air Supply.

While we second-guess the decent, intelligent, flawed human being in charge, wistfully wishing some hypothetical superpresident will come along and win a ginormous plurality while vanquishing all the special interests and bankers, simultaneously not spooking investors, and never making any compromises that really make us uncomfortable, the world keeps spinning.

It's good to criticize, Mr. Lind. It's very American and ennobling. But I'd prefer you to take a page from Glenn Greenwald and do it with facts, not conceits from flights of fancy or magical solutions from historical figures.

Don't forget that when Machiavelli tried to put his brilliant theories into practice, he was captured by the Medici, and hung by ropes until his body assumed the shape of a pretzel.

Obama has, to date, escaped this fate. But it is early.

Karen Houppert is a vampire and should be ashamed of herself for writing this shallow and misguided piece.

I've gotten very used to listening to marginal parties put forth weak, unconvincing cases for why they should be in power. Bland, boilerplate rhetoric, stale ideas, platforms put together by committees that sink without a ripple.

We have parties with fewer than 50,000 members, parties formed by practicing magicians whose solution to world problems is to gather together on a large lawn and collectively levitate.

I've never seen a party so mired in self-delusion.

The writer either does not get it, or gets it and thinks we are dumb enough to believe something else. I think he just doesn't get it.

There is not a reasonable majority on the right or left that believes Bush's failures are due simply to bad planning, bad luck and bad press.

The bottom line is, people don't trust those who refuse to admit their own faults. Or who pretend they don't exist.

Seriously. You people haven't learned a thing since Nixon.

Are you taking this seriously? Because it actually is a serious and difficult thing, governing a country. If you can't diagnose your own errors accurately, why should we trust you?

Whether abortion is merely the removal of an unwanted cluster of cells is likewise unprovable.

Speaking as one a liberal who finds abortion morally wrong, all I can say is, in the absence of real understand of the issues we are discussing - and none of us really understand when life begins, or how deep a wrong it is to end the life of a fetus - we should be humble.

Few issues highlight our human ignorance and susceptibility to facile arguments more clearly than this one.

Another "Dear Obama" diary entry. How original in format and execution.

Your advice would have been more prescient if you had given it back when every pundit I could find was only arguing about which of Obama's two brilliant indisputably choices was the best - Geithner or Summers.