Gymnastics is a judged competition, which means that the judging is what has driven female gymnasts to be younger and younger. And where men's gymnastics combines tests of strength and agility, women's gymnastics tends to ignore strength.

It just seems weird to me that a baseball player my age (Frank Thomas) can still play in the majors, while a female gymnast my age (Mary Lou Retton) peaked 24 years ago.

The age minimum is a necessary but seemingly insufficient step to make girl's gymnastics appealing to me. And I call it 'girl's gymnastics' because that's what it is.

As to the LW who asked about swimming and diving...well, swimming is not a judged sport. I personally would be quite happy to see all the judged sports removed from the Olympics: gymnastics, diving, figure skating, synchronized swimming, at whatever else there is.

If the meme appears to come from the McCain camp, it probably does.

Next week, Obama will be aloof again. Or withdrawn. Or perhaps he will not have villified John Edwards to the satisfaction of partisan Republicans.

Obama's lead has been reasonably stable for the past few months. You might as well ask whether McCain is "wearing us out", right?

The problem is not that girls can succeed at gymnastics, it's that older women cannot. If someone claims that "women above the age of 20 cannot compete in gymnastics", it is hardly relevant to the argument at all whether Harvard or MIT admits students of the age of 14. Harvard and MIT have plenty of adult students, too!

It is not a question of strength or speed, FWIW. Older women are stronger and faster. It's a question of flexibility.

A different point - somebody claimed "gymnasts are getting younger". Actually, from a practical standpoint, they are getting older. After Nadia Comaneci broke through at Montreal in 1976 at the age of 14, the sport skewed very young, with 14-15 year olds being the norm until the more recent reforms kicked in.

And the underlying question is whether society really wants young girls to be spending all of the very young years pursuing a sport to the exclusion of all other activities before they can develop any sense of independence. The 14-year old at Harvard will get an education that lasts a lifetime. The 16-year old gymnast who doesn't get a medal is pretty much washed up before the age of 20. I'm quite comfortable with adults pursuing short-lived career paths, but it seems weird when the entire career ends with puberty.

they shouldn't have used racist tactics. Did or did not Hillary Clinton equate "hard-working Americans" with "white Americans"?

I don't care if it's not a sincerely-held belief. She was willing to throw that out into the public sphere.

It seems to me that we should always be suspicious when the FBI, or indeed any other law enforcement agency, positively affirms that a major crime has been perpetrated by exactly one person, who received no help from anybody else, and furthermore just died.

If the FBI were to allow the possibility of an accomplice, then there wouldn't be a need to torture the realms of possibility with Dr. Ivins driving to New Jersey and back in the course of a work day, solely to mail some letters.

We are clearly looking at a situation where the investigators are not inferring the most likely scenario, but rather demanding that the only admissible scenario must somehow have been possible. They refuse to admit that the "Ivins working alone" scenario is deeply flawed.

Given how long the FBI and DoJ tried to pin the exact same case on Steven Hatfill, it should be clear to everybody by now that they are simply looking for a story to match with a fall guy. And Ivins, unlike Hatfill, is not around to defend himself.

The absurdity of the story should be apparent. Why, if Ivins wanted to mail the letters from an untraceable mailbox, would he drive from Frederick, MD to Princeton, NJ and back again in one day, when that trip would take at least 7 hours? This is hardly what a scientist would call the most parsimonious explanation. Indeed, what possible benefit would such a stunt have, when the anthrax alone would lead any law enforcement personnel to immediately start considering Fort Detrick?

The simplest explanation as to why the letters were mailed from Princeton is that the person who mailed them was in Princeton. This explanation has the implication that clearly the story being sold to us by the FBI is just so much baloney.

The fact that the FBI is trying to sell the public on an obviously flimsy case should in itself be troubling. What would motivate them to try to indict Ivins after his death, when they had ample opportunity to do so while he was alive? Is it so embarrassing for them to have failed so utterly on this case that they feel the necessity to put forward an explanation that doesn't bear up under the slightest bit of scrutiny? Or is somebody directing them to put forward an explanation that could justify no further investigation?

It's hard to know what the truth of the matter here is, but one thing that seems for certain, and that's the "Ivins worked alone" theory has to be jettisoned.