I believe that your negative attitude is part of what makes this a country of obese, out of shape people. Every form of physical exercise can be made a "sport", and usually is. Yet everyone needs and deserves to exercise. It is none of your business is people who have less running talent than your own (which is nothing special, I might add), choose the potentially healthy challenge of any length of marathon. Running and walking are universal means of human locomotion.

It is also a bizarre logical fallacy to suggest that non-competitive runners somehow impact on the accomplishments of competitive runners. Do playground basketball games "ruin" professional basketball? And also that you seem to endorse pushing to injury even when a major competition is not at stake.

You are essentially saying that people should not train with running unless they meet some arbitrary performance level, which you have somehow set. Or to put it another way, bothering to insult the achievements of others, even if it means cheapening your own achievement.

How ironic, as well, that you choose the example of Oprah for a rather callous and sexist insult, a woman who came quite close to matching your men's time. And I'm sure you ran yours younger, too.

In the end, in your bitterness, it is yourself you belittle. You reduce your own accomplishment from an impressive display of fitness and resolve, to a failed attempt to meet a standard you were genetically inadequate for. That is your choice, I suppose. I make a different choice.

Here's the reality.

(I should preface this by saying that, although I am a "liberal" by US standards, I am anything but a radical or conspiracy theorist. My political views consist largely of believing that the US should adopt more of the policies that are working well in other western-oriented democracies.)

Having said that, the right wing ideology of the Republican Party, which John McCain endorses, is a disaster, and another Republican administration will probably mean economic collapse and total isolation.

The mainstream media is a self-selected propaganda arm of the Republican Party. That may sound like an extreme statement, but I strongly defend it as a reasonable observation.

John McCain has deviated only very slightly from wingnut orthodoxy. For those slight deviations, he was ostracized, but now he is embraced because he can win.

John McCain is likely to win the nomination, and run with all mainstream media kissing his ass and giving him propaganda that Big Brother in 1984 could only dream of.

Meanwhile, the Democrat will be impugned and ridiculed by the slick professionals of the mainstream media, and by their not-so-unwitting allies on the art school anarchist kewl kid "left".

And this time, the Democrat really has to win. This is no joke. And it doesn't matter who the Democrat is. The car is headed for the cliff, and a Democrat administration is THE ONLY thing remotely resembling brakes that can work in time. This time there TWO choices, and one of them is guaranteed disaster.

Those of us who give half a rat's ass about this country have to be thinking of what we can do to fight effectively against McCain. Period. Oh, and remember, if it's close enough for cheating to work, the Republican wins. I defend that as another crazy-sounding but reasonable observation.

All summer, we're going to see the pro-Republican "mainstream media" ignore the savagery and sleaze of the Republican primary, while conflating any competition in the Democrat primary with "knives coming out", "race and sex conflict", etc.

The purpose of this strategy is plain - the Democrat who wins the primary will emerge tainted.

Good to see that Salon is on board with Fox and Time!

Apparently anyone whose name is associated with the words "Washington Bureau" is guaranteed to produce the same old one-sided anti-Democrat crap.

I wish that there was more policy difference between Obama and Clinton. I wish that Edwards had lasted a bit longer.

But at the end of the day, the reason this thing is being fought so hard is because the Democrat has a great chance of winning in November. The primary for the 2004 election was not as hard fought, largely because it was perceived that the election would be a tough one for a Democrat. Kerry ended up doing much better than anyone expected at the beginning of the primary season. He lost, but Bush won by the narrowest margin of any re-elected incumbent. But the reason the primary was soft was that people thought that the Democrat would be a longshot. This time it's different.

And that's good, because all the Democrats are much better than all the Republican. They are a far cry from perfect, but they are better. Any of them is would be a step on the road to sanity. Maybe the first step so that in ten or twenty years, our policies might be as sane as the ones in say, Australia or Canada. That's progress.

McCain appears to be the only Republican with a chance, but first he has to get the nomination, and then he has to stay popular when people learn what he actually stands for. And even if he does that, it's a coin flip.

Barring something unexpected, the winner of the Democrat primary has a very good chance of being elected president. And that's good. But it means that they will fight hard in the primary. Incidentally, the fact that the current Democrat candidates have put together passionate, committed followings is also a good sign, not a bad sign.

A soft primary united around a candidate that nobody feels very strongly about would not be preferable.