The process for getting a green card through marriage takes years, about three to five. During this whole period the letter writer would have to pretend to her family, friends, colleagues, acquaintances, everyone that this is a legitimate marriage. She'll have to live with this man during this whole period and get joint bank accounts and joint mortgages/leases, etc. Her sham husband will have the full legal and financial rights of a spouse, which will affect the letter writer's personal and business decisions and choices. This "sham" marriage will be a life-altering event, in personal, practical, and legal terms. And it might be even harder than a real marriage, because she'll have to do it without the emotional commitment and goodwill that a real marriage comes with and she'll have to do it with the constant possibility of being caught.

It would be one thing if she's planning to do it with someone whom she already knows well and has worked out the details (hey, but people are people, and often they don't stick to their agreements); that would be hard enough. But I should think if she's considering to go through this with a complete stranger, then it would be nearly impossible to pull off and still have a normal life.

Just saying.

It's funny that for all the effort Salon makes to be PC, it's rather hostile to women by serially publishing some of the most patronizingly vapid attempts at purportedly addressing women's issues.

I absolutely agree. It's similar to those occasional Salon articles stating that women vote not on the issues but according to their daddy-anxieties or shopping habits. Come on, Salon, surely there are articles about women and by women that don't make women look so helpless and pathetic.

Getting rid of Ayelet Waldman was a good first step, but, come on, Salon, choose your articles and authors with a little more of a critical eye.

My understanding was that Pune is the birthplace of the Shiv Sena, one of the most right-wing political parties in India. Perhaps it's not so easy to label a geographic location in India as liberal or conservative.

If I understand it correctly, the article's premise is:

Proposition 1: The general election will be decided on a winner-take-all basis.

Proposition 2: If the delegates in the Democratic primaries had been awarded on a winner-take-all basis, then Clinton would have won.

Conclusion: If Clinton were the Democratic nominee then she would win the general election.

The only way in which this rubric makes sense is:

(1) if the population of voters in the Democratic primaries is an accurate sample of the population of voters in the general election, which is obviously not true, because there will be at least some non-Democrats voting in the general election, and

(2) if voting for Clinton in the primaries equates to voting against Obama in the general election.

The Ervin J. Nutter Center is the basketball arena for Wright State University, a large public university. It's not a high school gym

Why not say that the winning candidates should take office within some set period (48 hours, perhaps?) of the results being finalized and accepted? That would avoid any constitutional crisis. If the Franken-Coleman vote takes longer to count, then that particular swearing in can take place whenever it's done. We don't need absolute uniformity in order to things to work.

Clark-Flory says:

"Male celebrities simply don't have the same motivation to bare all -- and I refuse to believe it's for actual lack of interest on women's part."

I don't understand the point here. Female celebrities' motivation to bare all is the result of demand (interest) on the part of the male audience and the resulting rewards (attention and money) that satisfying such demand brings. Isn't it? Are you suggesting that male celebrities wouldn't have the same level of motivation if the rewards were of the same magnitude as they are for female celebrities? Or that it's something other than attention and money that female celebrities are valuing as the reward for baring all?

The one advantage, in my view, of a Hillary Clinton presidency, was the prospect that we might do away with this ridiculous notion of a "first lady." My hope would have been that instead of morphing into a "first husband" or "first spouse," Bill Clinton would have helped usher out of history the demeaning notion that an elected official's spouse has any special status at all. We live in a democracy, in which each and every one of us represents the sovereignty of our state. We don't have a monarch who gets exclusive claim to representing the state. The president is merely a temporary employee who's there to do a job for us, his or her employers. There is absolutely no reason why a person who just happens to be married to this temporary employee should get special attention or status without every having been subjected to an election and without being subject to removal in the same way that any public official is in a democracy.

Not that I know a whole lot about the dom-sub world, but it seems to me that that is a place where limits are set forth and adhered to precisely, in the nature of a contract. It's also the place to find exactly the type of man who would be satisfied, or even eager, to "play" to the extent that the LW desires. So become a pro, perhaps not in the sense of exchanging money for it, but signing on to the appropriate groups and Web sites.

I think this is really the only reasonable option for the LW, because the limits proposed by her ("spanking and domination but no intercourse") are ones that are likely to result in frustration or misunderstanding with a guy off the street. Most men expect intimacy to lead to intercourse -- it's the biologically natural progression -- and the LW is likely to put most men off by proposing such limits.