Color me scared.

How these nutjobs miss the similarities to their brethren in other religions is beyond me.

If prayer could solve all the nation's ills, then what the hell are we spending $700 billion+ on, exactly? I'm sure quite a few people have been offering some pretty fervent prayers up throughout all this.

Just like I'm praying that these idiots and their mangled chromosome pick never get anywhere near the White House.

It sounds like you're on the verge of growing up. At the very least, it sounds like you've outgrown your immediate social options.

Everyone else seems very patient with this LW for some reason; I feel some kind of spark of irritation. Maybe I see this as emblematic of a widespread problem...and it's a problem that's not being remedied by patient suggestions to travel, join book clubs, or whathaveyou.

LW! Jesus. Go throw yourself at something! Why are you limiting yourself deliberately? It sounds like you could go try your hand at any number of things and enter a whole new social circle.

And it's hardly like it's an either-or proposition. You can keep, or wean yourself from, any of your friends. It's a huge world, and this country is still relatively free like that.

Get off your ass. And learn to like books, if you don't already. Read more. Associate with people who have something to offer, even if they're older than you. I mean, didn't you ever watch "Dead Poet's Society" or something?

If you believed without a doubt, that life began at conception, how would you feel about abortion? It is my right to believe this way. Seeing this issue as I do, there is no difference between an abortion and murdering the child. ...What gives us the right to decide who lives and who dies? If I can kill a baby because it's inside my body, whats to say I can't kill them when they are four years old, if they become inconvienient?

Ah, yes, the old "life is so sacred!" trope. So you feel this way, therefore everyone must kowtow to YOUR feelings? I notice that you make no provision for rape, incest, or any of the usual obvious exceptions. And if life is so sacred, how do you feel about war? The death penalty? Eating meat? How sacred is life?

I think you believe in cute and fluffy. You don't believe in life being sacred.

Flip it around, please? If you believe differently, and that people die all the time, and that our moral imperative is to give people the choices to be happy, then what? You are free to reproduce or not as you choose, but if someone else decides they need to get an abortion...that is their CHOICE.

I was buying a sandwich at Subway, and an old white man viciously attacked me with his cane! He saw my Obama pin and he attacked me for no reason! Then he carved "Sara HAWT" on my cheeks, but backwards.

He was white, probably 72 years old, and he was wearing white. White shoes, white pants. He had a derby hat on, too.

Oh, and he was wearing his underwear outside his clothes.

I was so scared!

See sig for link of where it happened. Ugh, I'm still so shaken up.

I don't think "whack job" is a sexist attack. That's more like an accurate description.

Well, it's nice to see everyone so blissed out. It's been a long 20 months, and I for one am glad to see it come to a close.

But the work's not done.

Tomorrow's when the right has to come to terms with its campaign tactics. And I sincerely hope there's a reckoning for those who advocated the divisive and incendiary tactics that we saw, especially over the last few months. Politics is a dirty game, but this was an especially bad presidential campaign season in that regard.

And there are other people to hold accountable now, too. It's finally almost time for Bush and company to start issuing pardons.

Wouldn't it be nice to see some of those charlatans' feet held to the fire for a bit?

Camille, time to hang up your spurs.

I mean, really. Waxing eloquent about Palin's raving incoherence (be-bop jazz? really? REALLY?), and claiming you see the intelligence in those bright winking eyes--are you sure you don't just like any woman who gets to the front of the line?

Palin is as anti-feminist an individual as you could find to fall in love with. She won't love you back, Paglia, so how about you put it back in your pants? It's unbecoming.

...is the seriously unreasonable set of expectations that those who criticize his writings seem to have ready and waiting at all times.

"Like 'Freakanomics' guru Steven Levitt, Gladwell promises to unravel our knottiest problems with the simplest of paradigms. By turning the macro into micro, he frees life of its chaos."

Um, when did Gladwell promise that? Is there some spot in the forward or introduction that I missed?

What Gladwell does (and does rather well) is approach topics with fresh perspective. He's intellectually curious, and is able to make connections between areas that sometimes don't seem to have relevance to each other. Sometimes they're good, sometimes they're kind of flat. In almost every case, though, he's not making reductionist arguments, but rather uncovering additional complexity. I disagree that he's trying to explain thorny problems with simple paradigms--frequently, he's explaining thorny problems with additional paradigms.

His writing style is another thing that he does pretty well. The structures of his book chapters and New Yorker articles are very narrative-driven, and that structure is compelling.

He should write an article exploring why. :-)