I doubt whether most of the posters here reveling in Donahue's and others discomfiture would find an "edgy" sculpture of Mohammad with a suicide-bomber's backpack on--made out of ham--very amusing.

Sounds amusing to me, although the ham part is a bad analogy -- chocolate is not anathema to Christians as ham is to Muslims. Then again, the ham part is what would make it funny, so *shrug*.

But what are you getting at here? Your hypothetical Mohammad sculpture would probaby cause riots and death threats among fundamentalist Muslims, and I thought most of us agreed that this was an over-reaction. So are you suggesting that Christians should be more like fundamentalist Muslims, so that people will tiptoe carefully around them in order to avoid setting off a wave of violence?

Because really, I think both groups need to get over it and have a little faith in their religions' ability to withstand criticism.

You just know Osama and his henchmen all high-fived and cheered when we went after Iraq. We took out his main secular rival in the region, destabilized the whole place, and created a whole new generation of recruits and martyrs for him.

Mission Accomplished!

This particular talking point wasn't mentioned specifically in the article, but I keep hearing it on the radio and it's making me crazy.

"Congress wants to micro-manage the war effort."

Why doesn't anyone ever call them on this? Micro-managing means interfering in all the little minute details of a plan. "Pulling the troops out of Iraq" is a management decision all the way at the macro end of the scale.

I dunno, I just hate to hear words being used to mean the opposite of what they mean. It's so... Orwellian.

Can somebody please let Harry Reid that there is no "r" in "Washington"?

Oh yes, let's hear some dialect correction from a Bush supporter. Are you keeping enough food on your family, E?

Just kidding.

I understand the concern with keeping the game world faithful in tone to the world in the books. There are no guns in the books, and I assume in the game world as well, and I'd scoff at anyone who read this as an attack on the Second Amendment. Nor will there, presumably, be an option to play as a diaper-wearing underaged furry, despite this being possible in multiplayer worlds like Second Life (no, really). So there are obviously going to be lines somewhere.

On the other hand, the game can't possibly work if it stays too narrowly focused on the boundaries of the books. Not everyone can be the Ringbearer, and you can't keep thousands of players happy without venturing outside the books. Really, given the way Middle-Earth works, I think it's a poor choice for a MMORPG -- almost no wizards, for one thing, the same problem Star Wars Online ran into with jedis. Anything done to make it work with a player base in the thousands is going to compromise the tone of the books anyway.

I don't really see a good answer here.

It's NOT "micromanaging"!!!!!! Stop calling it that already!

Making large-scale decisions about the course of an entire project is NOT micromanaging; it's the OPPOSITE.

The Lost creators are teasing out these mysteries piece by piece, and that's clearly what a lot of the audience wants. Puzzles inherently involve a certain level of frustration, and that's fine.

What's not fine is that these characters, who are our proxies in the puzzle-solving, are so bad at it. If Lost is a huge, magnificent, unfolding crossword puzzle, then watching these gormless bozos blundering through it is like working that crossword with a pencil held in your mouth.

Dragging out your intricate mystery by making the characters incompetent is lazy writing. I still enjoy the show a lot, but it could be better.

While listening to Ms. Monica's sound bites on Randi Rhodes' show on Air America Radio, I envisioned the ditzier secret twin sister of Elle, the heroine of "Legally Blonde." Now that I'm looking at your photograph, I'm imagining a secret twin of ... yikes...Ann Coulter!

Am I missing something? Are there photos in War Room that I'm not seeing for some reason? I don't see any.

Let me see if I have this right:

1. We do not understand what is causing the collapse.

2. Lots of people caused lots of things to change.

3. Therefore: Blame people for causing the collapse.

Sorry, but the logic escapes me.

Ah, the "blame game" rebuttal, a noxious variant of "shoot the messenger" that keeps getting trotted out by know-nothings with increasing frequency.

You forgot to take it one step farther; perhaps you haven't been paying enough attention to talk radio and TV pundits. The next step in your argument should have been:

4. Therefore: The collapse does not matter.

That's the basic argument for ignoring global warming among the wingnuts, isn't it? Some people who are warning about it are trying to play the blame game, so the entire issue does not matter.

Works in politics too. People who find fault with the Administration's many failures are just "Bush haters", so those failures do not matter.

It's like the lowlifes on Cops who complain that the police hate them personally and are harassing them, never mind the bruises on their wives' faces.

Anything to divert attention from the actual, serious problem at hand. Nice job.

Why do the troops hate the troops so much?

Plame's status has nothing to do with Libby's conviction for perjury. If it came out tomorrow that Plame hired skywriters to fly banners reading, "I work for the CIA," it wouldn't change the fact that Libby obstructed justice.

If his lawyers really want to dispute Plame's covert status, maybe they would agree to waive his right against double jeopardy and start the proceedings all over again -- and this time he can tell the truth, give up whoever he's protecting, and avoid jail time. I'd be OK with that.