I stopped using my premium name because some troll hijacked it to post garbage.

Two things I would like to see, if possible:

1.) Contacting people who name-call other posters in the letters section and telling them that ad hominem attacks are not acceptable. When we vehemently disagree with something someone has written, we should not attack the poster. We should write our reasons for disagreeing with the position the poster has taken. It is really tiresome to read a letters section filled with letters attacking other people, calling them stupid and vile and disgusting. I will be on my guard to resist doing this.

2.) Not allowing a thread to become a flame war between two or three people. This is especially annoying when there are people who are posting interesting letters in between the flame war. Who wants to wade through the same people saying *the same things* over and over again? After a letterwriter has responded to or rebutted a specific poster or opinion twice, they've pretty much said it all. One may think one is engaging in "free speech", but Salon isn't run by the government. It's a privately-owned and paid-for site. Just because one is a monetary contributor doesn't give one the right to eat up bandwidth with repetitive, flame-baiting posts on the same subject. One messageboard I read recently started deleting flamewar posts and issuing warnings to repeat offenders and it has made the threads so much more interesting. It used to be that threads would devolve into flamewars between a couple of people after one page of posts. Everyone else would abandon the thread. Now, threads are clearer, more incisive, more informative and more enjoyable, as they now have three or more pages of readable, varied responses instead of one page.

I enjoy seeing how other people look at an issue and find I can learn a lot about how to write more effectively when I read other people's posts. It is such a pleasure to read reasonable letters/threads as compared to trying to find anything decent to read in between pages of "You suck, asshole/No YOU suck, you moron!"

My friend's mother is about 75 years old. She used to work as a secretary in the recording industry in the 1970s and 1980s. She was an old-fashioned Gal Friday who did everything from booking châteaux for rocker vacations to making coffee and picking up the dry cleaning. She occasionally drove rock stars to and from the airport or delivered record-company things to them when they were in town, a chore she did not relish. Except for one rock star --- Keith Richards. She absolutely loved him, said he was one of the nicest people she'd ever met. You should have heard her rave about him, you would think he was the quintessential Boy Next Door. Unfailingly polite, gracious, thoughtful, intelligent, a good conversationalist.

True, she was used to moronically arrogant 1970s leotard-and-lion's-mane rockers who thought throwing a micropone up in the air and catching it made them far-fucking-out, man. The kind of dopes who made endless lists of backstage demands and wound up in bankruptcy court by 1992. Still, she swore Keith Richards was one of the nicest, funniest, finest "young men" she'd ever met on the job or off. She sometimes sighed and said to her daughter "Why can't you find someone as nice as Keith Richards, only without the heroin?"

That has to say something about him.

You hear that, Connecticut? He's talking about you.

Don Imus's big audience was made up of Baby Boomers who are now retiring in large numbers. They're sleeping in now rather than tuning in to Imus in the morning. That has to have an effect on his ratings.

I looked in on my local NY metro-area's online newspaper and found the comments on the Imus story filled with indignant rants of Baby Boomers who seem to be of the opinion that Imus is some kind of cutting edge rebel. Don Imus is in fact a dessicated old ratbag who hasn't been funny or original since 1973. His sneering, grumpy old man complaints about the world outside of Don Imus's head, delivered in a near-indecipherable mumble, are is as cutting edge as my grandmother's rock garden.

This measly little "controversy" is being stirred and magnified by NBC, which houses Imus's low-ratings morning grouse-fest on MSNBC, in order to outrage wheezing old Boomers into tuning in to his show again. I mean come on, NBC even has the Today Show's Al Roker weighing in on it. Al Roker, whose most controversial statements to date have been sly digs at the Incredible, Edible Egg.

I have no doubt the honchos at GE cued two other new millenium vaudevillians, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, to make stock-villain responses guaranteed to provoke fat-bottomed white Boomers so they can get another chance to gripe about how unfair it is that black people get to say the n word all the time, but poor old Imus is being persecuted for making a hipster joke, golldarnit!

I mean come on, Sharpton and Jackson might as well be twirling moustaches and intoning "But you must pay the rent!" --- their schtick is THAT old.

You guys are being so played.