One poster asked: "What was the real story there? Certainly not that Jane Fonda and the other celebrities and fringe groups showed up to speak and try to be heard."

Well, I don't think it takes a media consultant to tell you that if you invite Jane Fonda to speak at a rally, then that is going to be the news story. If you invite Time Robbins and Susan Sarandon to speak, they will be the story. They were in fact invited to speak because it insures that it gets on TV. They certainly don't have anything particularly unique or insightful to say. They were there for their celebrity and then people complain that all that was noticed was their celebrity.

If the organizers wanted this to be about regular americans, then the only people who should have spoken should have been regular americans. They could have rounded up families of soldiers and airmen, veterans of the war (this war, not Vietnam), etc. Maybe a policy expert or a historian or someone with some knowledge about the topic, I don't know.

But they didn't let parents or experts speak. They put Hanoi Jane up there and then were shocked (shocked!) that the march was not universally embraced. If the point was to reach a broad swath of America, then putting up perhaps the most polarizing yet irrelevent figure in the country (Does any one really give a shit what Jane Fonda has to say? ) is certainly not the way to go. Jane can say anything she likes, but anyone with any connection to reality had to know that allowing her to speak meant that that was going to be the story.

How freaking dense do you have to be to misread the way TV works? Probably just dense enough to get hired by the democratic nominee who will then shoot himself/herself in the foot and doom us to 8 years of President Brownback or some such.

I am all for free expression and every anarcho-syndicalist commune can send their executive officer for the week and her comarades to any rally they want. God bless 'em.

However, the effect of that, is that many progressives (or even conservatives) who oppose the war don't want to participate. Our mothers told us that we would be judged by the company we keep and they were right.

So, before the scolds start telling us that asking for a march to be focused on one advertised topic is just doing the Man a favor by marginalizing those brave souls who want to free Mumia or defend the glorious nation of North Korea, maybe those scolds should think about it pragmatically.

I will never attend a mass march again because, without exception, every march I have attended in the past has been filled with off-topic causes. I didn't sign up for that and neither will most of the non-professional activists.

Cut off your noses to spite your faces and relish your ideological righteousness, but don't expect mass participation to follow. And no, 100K people is not mass participation. UM gets 120K in Ann Arbor eevery weekend for the noble cause of football, so what's 100K walking around a city when all the decision makers have gone away for the weekend?

Silent candle-lit vigils are all I will attend now since they're pretty and you don't have to listen to boring old Jane Fonda (or worse, Jane Fonda wannabes).

I am wondering if there has been any study as to the environmental costs of large scale soy farming. I try to eat as much healthy, non-processed food as possible. I buy some organics when the cost-benefit strikes me as worth it (milk, yes; apples, no). I eat meat that I either killed myself or purchased on a local farm, had butchered and packed in my freezer.

But I am always horrified in the organics section of my supermarket. It all seems so processed and while I am impressed that they canmake soy into so many things, I also wonder what they hell they have to do to it to make it so.

I always get the feeling that somehow we'll find out that all these seeming hippy brands of organic almond butter or cruelty free veggie pops are actually owned and manufactured by shell corporations belonging to ADM or ConAgra. It just strikes me as so much marketing.

I'd rather buy the ingredients and make something myself even if it's just a porkchop, steamed broccoli and a microwaved potato.

I have been advocating a relegation system for the NHL for years, although I don't think there's a need to go to the minor leagues. At least not initially.

I think they just split the current league. The top sixteen teams could become the NHL Labatt's Premiership and the bottom fourteen could be the Barclay's Bank First Division or some such with the bottom two from Labatt's moving down and the top two from the Barclay's moving up.

I envision a straight 8 team playoff in the premiership and a six team playoff with byes for the leaders. That way the season is meaningful for almost every single team unlike the EPL where midlevel teams know they're not going up or down from about halfway through the season.

The two 8 team divisions in the premiership would change according to who was moved up and who was relegated. But I'd like to see a north/south divide rather than a east/west one to get all the Canadian teams and Buffalo into the same league.

If the season ended now, the Premiership would have a northern division of Buffalo, Detroit, NJ, Montreal, Ottawa, Calgary, Vancouver, Minnesota; and a southern division of Nashiville, Anaheim, San Jose, Atlanta, Dallas, Carolina, Tampa Bay and Colorado.

Wouldn't it be great to mock Toronto for being a second tier team? Maybe next year, eh, Leafs' fans?

Hosers.