For Bush, it's all politics, all the time (with politics for Bush meaning, how much money can he loot from the U.S. Treasury for himself and his friends?). The Undersecretary is merely doing Bushie Boy's business.

January 2009: the people of the United States reclaim their country from the Bush den of thieves and murderers.

Monsters do monstrous things. Bush is a monster. Cheney is a monster. The GOP is so infested with monsters, they could fill up Disney's Haunted Mansion.

We cannot expect any better of these things. We can only increase the Democratic majority, elect a Democratic President, and then take care of business.

Until Bush is gone from office, our political process will suck, plain and simple.

I know a woman who devotes all of her money, time and energy to finding homes for cats and kittens on death row (kill shelters). She cares for newborn kittens and ill cats until they are well. She is a saint.

My nephew could have earned a very high income as an engineering Masters from a very prestigious university. Instead, he's teaching science in an inner-city public school. He's a saint.

You get the picture. A woman who sits on her ass in comfort and hugs people who adore her isn't a saint. She may not be a bad person, but a saint? No fucking way.

Tomatoes, like other vegetables, have no central nervous systems and do not feel pain. That is why you won't ever hear them scream.

Life may feed on life, but we humans have the ability to make a moral choice on which life we will consume. You can minimize suffering by eating as low down the food chain as possible, and by eating only vegetables.

Tell me that plunging a knife into a cabbage creates the same degree of suffering as plunging a knife into a chicken, and I will tell you that you are at best ignorant, and a worst a willful liar.

Finally, given the well-documented horrors of factory farms (www.factoryfarms.com), nobody who claims to have concern for animals, or claims to be opposed to cruelty to animals, can eat any product of a factory farm.

"All beings tremble before violence. All fear death, all love life. See yourself in others. Then whom can you hurt? What harm can you do?"

--Buddha

People around the world have been eating soy protein, in various forms, for thousands of years. My family has eaten it for decades. Take that Utne article with a grain of salt...

Which leads to your excellent point about killing snails by pouring a caustic agent on them. Of course it causes them pain. Snails have the ability to feel pain, and while it may be on a scale more primitive than ours, for them it is still pain, and so I can't see how killing them that way can be justified in any way.

People have an amazing ability to rationalize away things they'd rather not think about too deeply. Your comment about lobsters is also apt. I think that anyone who feels it is humane to boil a living creature to death should stick their hand into a pot of boiling water for five seconds. After that, if they think it's humane to kill an animal that way, then so be it.

I was expecting a harder-hitting punchline. The setup was perfect.

Garry Owen, I hear the "N" word almost every day, usually as a lyric in a song blasting out of some kid's car. You can also see a variation of the N word here in Salon, i.e., nigga.

I don't like hearing it and I don't like seeing it no matter how it's spelled, but thanks the mass media, it's everywhere.

While there would still be death and suffering, without humans, the world would be a kinder place.

Scenario one: humanity stays here on Earth and keeps reproducing and reproducing and reproducing. 20 billion on the planet? 30? It will be us and the cockroaches and rats.

Scenario two: Gaia gets fed up and greatly reduces our number with a potent plague, or stormy weather. Floods, drought, mass starvation, disease. A little dab will do ya.

Scenario three: we go to the stars. We need to colonize the moon, and Mars. We need to mine the resources of the asteroid belt. Set up solar energy panels in low orbit. After all, a house can hold only so many people.

Place your bets. I put my money on scenario number two. It's human nature. Too bad the rest of creation will suffer along with us.

Your math is unassailable. My proposed solution is really a way to ensure the continuation of the human species. While we're setting up shop in space, the Earth will most definitely go down the toilet. However, minerals and metals and other resources from the moon and the asteroid belt, and even Jupiter's atmosphere, would help the people left on a resource-depleted Earth.

Then again, I'm misanthropic and proud of it, so despite my lofty visions of a Star Trekkin' humanity, I fully expect it all to end here, badly.

It's only satire by a hair's width. Admit it, anyone who has gone to that site: you weren't sure at first, were you?

That's how twisted our American Taliban (Christianban?) has become. They are almost beyond satire.

I am fully sympathetic to this woman's plight, and I do think that there should be a law that guarantees people time off when they have suffered a certain level of physical or psychological harm (which often go hand in hand).

My opinion: this woman's boss at FedEx is a scumbag.

That said, he/she was under no legal compulsion to give this woman time off, so I question whether she'll win her suit. Maybe she can establish some sort of hostile workplace basis -- who knows?

The much larger question is why does anyone, or any corporation, treat their employees like dirt? That's a question that should bother us all.