If she doesn't come back from maternity leave, she will have to start all over, or take a job at lower pay in a different industry. She should read "The Case FOr Marriage" by Linda Waite and really think about this stay at home for five years thing. As Jack Welch put it, giving her that priviledge is unfair to the women who DID have their children in daycare. On top of that, her skills will be rusty. It's hard for anyone, male or female, to get a job without retraining after six months unemployment.

If she wants to stay home for five years in most industries, she should save enough to retrain or take certification classes when she goes back in, and prepare to take an entry level position. That's the way it is. While writers can slip in and out of the full time market, that's not the case for other industries. Writers claiming you can stay at home without losing anything have really done a disservice to most mothers.

Staying at home is a financial sacrifice that mostly mothers (but increasingly some fathers) make. I don't think this LW realizes that. If you know you'll take a career hit and still choose to stay home, that's one thing. Unrealistically expecting to not lose anything is another.

Many Americans believe violence and power corrupts, and that ends don't justify means. It is a very American view, and in some ways a VERY Christian view (Jesus and turn the other cheek thing). Here, Spielberg uses Mossad assassins to examine it, and irony in many ways. In this vision, the original issue is always obscured by violence as a counter tactic, especially state sponsored violence. In many ways, this explains why non-violence is the only protest tactic that works in the US- most Americans equate armed self defense with the violence of the original act. Most Americans are suspicious of power and despite political lip service to armed self-defense, most of the US public does not like it, especially when done by "others". The ANC of South Africa had to stop utilizing terror (bombing malls, for instance) to get mainstream American supprt in the 1980s. The ideas of "a pox on all of your houses" and "it is more noble to love and forgive your enemies" resound very strongly within American culture. With the exception of 9-11, the mainstream media culture has always been ambivalent about violence.

This view is not shared by most in Europe and Latin America. It is also not shared by theoretical elitists, but for different reasons. (Brooks is not conservative- he does not want to conserve the status quo- he wants to change it. He and his fellow big government politicos make Goldwater spin in his grave.) It is legitimate to disagree with it- it is not legitimate to dismiss it, as Brooks does, as naive or ill informed. The view should be engaged. It is a sad and salient point that the people GOldberg discusses are too elitist to engage or refute the view. Your average soldier can refute, or at least discuss, the impact of violence very intelligently. Why can't these think tank real commandos do the same?

"Munich", with it's introspection, is very American in it's view of violence and power corrupting . The reactionary attack is very elitist. How dare the hoi poi discuss the effects of violence! How dare anyone discuss history in this way without their political permission!

I will go to see this film. I may not agree with it (special forces personnel usually don't have time for the type of dramatic introspection discussed here), but I will see it. Any movie that makes us think and has a great story in it deserves support.

If it is actually taught accurately, Intelligent Design actually supports Darwin. For instance, there has been no example of irreducible complexity ever found. Nor has any of the other tenets of ID ever been found in nature. If these things are found, Darwin is undermined, but they have NOT been found. By expanding this accurate summary, you reinforce evolution and undermine ID.

To truly teach it would take a much more sophisticated and mathematically complex lecture than the one sentence of ID. It would also demand that we teach American children science more competently than we do. THAT is the problem. AMerica sucks at teaching science, and we face a scientific brain drain. Instead of addressing that, we waste time on this junk.

I have been shocked at the number of truly scientificly illiterate people in the world, who equate these two ideas as equal. If they were literate, they would understand why ID fails the test of science (no supernatural explanations, for instance- science is based on facts and mechanistic explanations fo the universe.

What truly offends me is that ID proponents blaspheme God. If God wanted to use evolution to create the world, God can. It's called omnipotence. To claim that "it must be an intelligent designer and nor evolution" is to argue that God can't create evolution, and that God is a prankster, giving us fossil evidence and micro-evolutionary evidence to confuse us. The proponents of ID, like the attack on Happy Holiday crowd, ultimately make God small. My God is not a prankster, and I don't want him used to sell thongs to teenagers. I will fight ID, and say Happy Holidays, because both are a part of a small minded attack on American values and real Christian values.

Behe's work on irreducible complexity has been refuted. Actually, Behe drives scientists mad, because those systems all have alternative or adaptive uses. There is, right now, no example of irreducible complexity that has stood scientific testing.