You know, I DON'T CARE whether women choose to bottlefeed or breastfeed. I really don't. They should have the choice to do whatever the hell they want, but I am here to tell you, as many of my thirty-something and above brethren are, that we were formula fed and somehow--somehow!--developed into normal, healthy, intelligent children who went on to get Ph.D.'s and become doctors and lawyers and whatever and still call our mothers weekly and send them tulips on their birthdays and Mother's Day. And all through my childhood I sat in a carseat that was like a booster seat and a TOTAL DEATHTRAP in a car that didn't have airbags, and when I was eight and my sister was four we used to fight all the time about who got to ride shotgun (and even when my sister lost she'd still outgrown the car seat. Oh, yeah, and my brother was breastfed and although he got through college by the skin of his teeth and has a good job, he is now neurotic and obsessive-compulsive and unable to maintain a relationship with a woman other than his mother and sisters, but that might not have anything to do with breastfeeding...come to think of it, it's probably because of his VACCINATIONS, yeah, that's it! Gee, I have no idea how we made it to adulthood relatively unscathed.

Please stop. Stop it RIGHT NOW! Campaigns to promote breastfeeding in places where it makes a great deal of economic and health sense, like developing nations where formula is expensive and the water supply is full of heavy metals and evil microbes, I can understand. But for the rest of you, it's all insecurity and gamesmanship.

Whew, some real common sense. And I would add: the New York Times claimed there were weapons of mass destruction, too. Don't believe everything you read. These days, the Grey Lady is actually a two-bit hooker from Vegas.

It's the powerful men that Dowd and her cohort seem to want. Tyler, I think you're right that things could be different for later generations--I'm under forty, and most of our circle (mostly male scientists and their wives) are academics--Ph.D.'s married to other Ph.D.'s, or, failing that, ABDs and M.A.'s. Our incomes are comfortable, but the husbands are really more interested in pursuing their research than moving and shaking. Some of the wives, however, are a different story: many are faculty, but some are journalists, politicians, and University policymakers. Who knows? In time, some of them may leave their spouses for trophy husbands.

I think, in the end, it may be a psychological hurdle that Dowd and her contemporaries simply have been unable to clear because of the residual expectations of their generation and those of their parents. I still have problems explaining to my mother (who is about 10 years older than Dowd) that no, close collaboration with colleagues of the opposite sex rarely leads to personal involvement, that sometimes it makes a lot more sense for a man to stay home with children, and that a man who makes less than his wife is not necessarily a deadbeat.

I am sick and tired of being told I'm a bad person if I say "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" just because I want to respect people of all faiths.

That, itself, is NOT "political correctness" (I HATE THAT TERM!) but good manners.

And as a secular Unitarian who enjoys singing Christmas carols, attends Christmas Eve services, has a tree and Christmas lights and EVERYTHING, I feel as though Christmas is being stolen from ME. My Christmas is all about kindness, generosity, love, mercy, joy, and peace. While these are all Christian values, at least in theory, they don't require subscription to a particular faith--or any faith, for that matter, other than faith in humanity, which the Right Wing Noise Machine and its hordes of followers are sorely trying right now.

By insisting that Christmas must be all about the putative birth of a rabbi whose betrayal by his own religious leaders, politically expedient execution, and alleged resurrection--while entirely ignoring that rabbi's important, difficult, and possibly dangerously subversive teachings--they're basically saying that one isn't really entitled to celebrate Christmas unless one toes their dogmatic line. That people like Bill O'Reilly enable the sanctioning of rude, petty, vicious, uncivil behavior underscores the petty vicious mess they're making of the Christmas they're howling about protecting. What would Jesus do?

Someone mentioned having to have a quarter at all times in case of emergencies--I remember having a dime taped to the inside of my ice skate case, hah!

Seriously, though: a few years ago, before I had a cellphone, I was late meeting my husband at a colleague's dinner party and found myself wandering all over the downtown of a major Midwestern city trying to find a pay phone from which to call him. Believe it or not, I couldn't find one that was functioning. The city had been phasing out pay phones, supposedly to prevent drug dealers from having places where they could do business. It was maddening, and I'm sure there are now fewer pay phones than ever before.

So for kids these days, a cell phone may be a necessity, no matter how excessive it may seem--and the post gave me pause, too.

These guys have no sense of humor. However, coming here to read their whiny pukings about the elusive strawfeminist (bless Echidne of the Snakes for coining that term) provides some slight amusement.

I'm just curious--was this Missouri Synod, Wisconsin Synod, or ELCA? While Lutherans in general aren't as welcoming to gays and lesbians as other denominations, I can't imagine someone representing the ELCA responding this way. The other two groups are fundamentalist.