Your anger is real, but this is not the time to capitalize on it. This election will close enough that we cannot afford progressives absenting themselves because the Democratic candidate is insufficiently zealous about their personal number one issue. The only way you can rationalize not voting for Obama is if you believe that there is no difference, as far as women's rights are concerned, between him and John McCain. And that is simply not true. Even without adopting any policies from your list (and I'm pretty sure Obama can be trusted to try for proper sex-ed, which McCain absolutely cannot), Obama's aims are more likely to be in harmony with your own than McCain's are. And, as an aside, some of the items on your list Clinton wouldn't have adopted; they are not politically expedient, and no politician in this country (who wants to win, anyway) is going to adopt a plank that is not expedient.

Secondly, let's assume, for the sake of argument, that a significant minority of women did follow your advice and embrace their anger, vote McCain, write in Hillary, or just stay home, and in doing so swing the election to McCain. How does this help? You've had a snit, and now not only are your goals scuppered for another four, maybe eight, years, but so are the goals of the entire progressive movement (such as it is in this country). You don't think that's going to breed some enmity? You don't think it might actually make the greater portion of the Democratic party more hostile to women candidates and women's issues rather than less? And let's not forget that a continuation of Republican hard-right policies would itself be detrimental to your goal of gender equality.

What I'm trying to say is this: we need every vote this year, and to throw it away because you are upset about how your candidate was treated in the primaries (justifiably so or not I won't even try to reckon) is not only selfish, but self-sabotaging. If I thought that the Democrat was going to win by a landslide in November, I'd say go ahead and cast a protest vote; we can afford it. But we probably can't, and it's impossible to know in advance if we could. I'm sorry, but this is a year for pragmatism. The world isn't always going to move forward on our say-so, and rather than pack up our toys and go home in a huff, we have to settle for what forward progress we can.

Yeah, diving sucks, but as was pointed out in the past letters thread, it's likely that Kyrgiakos didn't get up because to do so would have been to risk knocking into Larsson and thereby triggering a possible penalty decision by the ref. Kyrgiakos hit Larsson in midair; it might have been a dive when he went down, but it just as easily might have been from contact. Then, watching an overhead replay, it's clear that from the moment Kyrgiakos hit the ground, Larsson was directly on top of him, stepping between Kyrgiakos's legs and then over his torso as he pursued the ball. Had Kyrgiakos gotten up with Larsson on top of him like that, it would almost certainly have resulted in a penalty. Given that the Greek keeper was still in position and that there was another defender available and in position to clear the ball, it seems to me that Kyrgiakos made the right decision. You can find a good series of replays at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qinWJzv-ocs, assuming it's not been taken down yet. It's irritatingly overdubbed with some song, but it's the best I could find.

Most of us find diving irritating. That said, we put up with it, just like fans of other sports put up with their own forms of gamesmanship. When an self-confessed casual observer complains about one of our chosen sport's foibles, it's a little grating, rather as if I'd said to, say, a basketball fan, 'I watch basketball occasionally, and I kind of like it, but aren't they a bunch of cheating bastards with that late-game fouling!'. And then, if I tried to illustrate my point with an example that was at best questionable and at worst demonstrably wrong, it would all sound a hell of a lot like a smug insinuation of the inherent moral superiority of whichever sport(s) I happened to favor.

Those of us who are over forty, apparently. One wonders what those of us over seventy were up to—not living through the Depression, I guess. But presumably septuagenarians aren't using the internet, and so do not count. Or perhaps they're all dead; it's a very difficult sentence to parse.

It's the rod of Asclepius. The caduceus (two serpents around a winged staff) represents Hermes and commerce, while the rod of Asclepius (on serpent wrapped around a normal staff) represents healing and medicine.