My question about the photos, as well as all other government documents, is: Who paid for them? Who paid the photographer and the associated developer, etc. If the answer is the taxpayers (as I suspect), then how can they possibly be kept from the public?

I am so disgusted about this. We even have people selling the documents they created while employed by the government as if they owned them. How can one branch withold documents from another? How can they be sealed in places like presidential libraries for many years? How can the press roll over (as usual) on this?

Everyone is entitled to their opinion about food and agriculture, but it is unethical to mislead the public on matters of fact. As a farmer and veterinarian, I can assure you that this piece contains misleading information. To understand corn production, one must realize the difference between yields per acre of sweet corn for human consumption and field corn (ears, leaves and stalks) for animal feed. I also question the figure given for consumption of poultry litter, as I am located in a poultry growing area and find that very few cattle are fed any litter even here. Most of the few farmers who fed it at one time have stopped, and it may soon be banned altogether. In the country as a whole, poulty litter feeding is negligible.

In addition, if cattle production required the amounts of oil stated in the article, then no one could produce cattle. The value of the finished 1350 pound steer is about $1150, so obviously the production chain could never sustain even close to a fuel bill of $500 per steer. I don't have enough space to outline the production chain in detail in order to prove this to you, but on my own farm I add 300 pounds to steers by exclusively grazing grass from April to October. I might use one or two gallons of fuel per head per year, and no inorganic fertilizer or pesticides or herbicides. This holds true for farms all across the country on which calves are born and grazed for almost all their lives before being sent to feedlots for a few months.

I only wish that people who pontificate on agricultural practices would spend many days on many farms all around the country. As a personal aside, I will never buy eggs from caged hens. I agree that it borders on the barbaric, and I agree that some of our methods in animal agriculture are in need of real revision. Farmers would be glad to change if production economics allowed.

Didn't we at one time have like 10,000 warheads? What could they have been thinking? Am I missing something?

Are Edward Teller (for "making" us go from the A bomb to the H bomb) and Richard Perle (for talking Reagan out of total abolition of nukes at the Iceland summit) the greatest villians of the last half of the last century? And how about Geo. H.W. Bush's B team to reassess Soviet strenth? The idiocy is almost too much to bear.....

I wish Salon would find a movie reviewer who perhaps actually liked movies and had something interesting and infromative to say about them.

For example, I would have thought any discussion of this type of movie would have included a reference to "The Year of Living Dangerously," which is the best of the lot.

Hmmm....Wasn't David Strathairn excellent as the leading man in Limbo and Passion Fish? I have to say I liked both of these movies and, well, actually liked all the nominated guilt movies.Wouldn't most viewers rate them at least above average?

I daresay most Americans do not even know or care whether any of Sen. Obama's ancestors were New World slaves. In fact, I think many Americans do not think of his race at all, and, if they do, they feel it is a plus because gives him a wider point of view.

Is it possible that Ms. Dickerson has succumbed to the temptation to think too much, sucking all the joy from the moment?

I have been trying in vain to prod any of the journalistic pack to ask the President what he means by his oft repeated phrase "We must defeat the enemy over there in Iraq or they will follow us home." In fact, in local news stories about two very young soldiers from this area who were killed in Iraq the families mentioned that the boys volunteered so that we would be fighting "them" overseas so that we would not be fighting them here.

So, would someone please ask the President exactly who the enemy is that will come here?

How many does he expect will come here?

How will they get here?

How many will it take to do us serious damage (since only 19 perpetrated 9/11)?

Can we kill or capture the enemy down to the last person?

Such questions seem important and obvious, but I haven't heard them asked.

As I recall, Newt was the instigator of extreme party polarization as a route to political success. He was the original Young Turk in the Republican Party who smashed his way to minority whip. He paved the way for Tom Delay and the many hammer wannabes!!

You may guess the reason, but he appears mellower these days.

Great take on the final episode. Brilliant ending. I love the way Tony can look so reptilian when that part of his brain takes over.

Like a mafia don convicted for tax evasion, Libby should do serious time for this lesser offense of perjury because we all know he and his colleagues are guilty of criminal negligence in failing to plan for a post invasion Iraq. Of course, Scooter and the others are also guilty of several counts of subverting the constitution and interfering with intelligence analysis. Again like the mafia dons, they are likely responsible for crimes we will never know about, the fallout from which affect many innocent people.