It is with some hesitation that I offer a warning to anyone who finds himself or herself the object of Ms. Baumgardner's attentions: she appears to be incapable of sustaining any relationship beyond what's in it for her. As soon as she grows weary of the quotidian "I love you" of her female-focused phase, she will be off to sate her appetite for something in a male. Sounds like she leaves a lot of people rejected, in the long run.

There's nothing wrong with bisexuality, except that it implies that a person can never have a sexual relationship that is fully experienced with a single partner. If you are one of the many people who finds such adventure and diversity enriching, then you will be a good mate to a bisexual. If you are, however, inclined to have a long and uncomplicated sexual intimacy with someone, steer clear of bisexuals.

There's nothing quite as stunning as the realization that you couldn't satisfy someone's desires, no matter what you might do. That is the lot of a gay or straight person who falls for someone like Ms. Baumgardner. It's rather strange that bisexuals are so seldom attracted to other bisexuals. At least they could understand the chaotic emotions that are stirred up by their attentions.

We should all be aware that Muslims who speak out are calling attention to themselves and putting their families and communities at risk, should they offend anyone -- and offense is easy to come by. Mr. Barrett does us a good service to keep us informed about Muslim leaders who are coming to a finer understanding of their role in educating and elucidating a faith and a culture that are still unfamiliar to most Americans.

Muslim leaders must, themselves, understand that Islam is not immediately understandable to most Americans. Though Americans are probably one of the most religious people in the world, most of them do not know much about any faith but their own -- and often, not very much about formal dogmas or theology, whatsoever. If Muslim Americans want to be understood, they will have to take on the responsibility to educate the public, gently and sensitively, just as every other religious person must speak of his faith carefully and with respect for the faith of others. This is the challenge of a pluralistic society.

We may, at last, be coming to a period when open dialog can begin, without undue risk to anyone. But this has at best only lately been possible. Let's hope that Muslim Americans will be able to step outside their communities and become a more vibrant part of our society.

So we're all agreed. In a perfect world, a gasoline tax would be the most sensible solution.

In a perfect world, income would be distributed fairly, resources would be allocated according to the best possible outcomes, and economists would all agree on something other than the need for economists. The idea that such a perfect world is extant even in the wet dreams of economists is laughable. Economists are always exploiting this "perfect world" illusion to propose ridiculous notions that are ill-defined, untestable, and completely without logical cohesion.

Nevertheless, we are left to seriously entertain such a ridiculous notion as choosing either CAFFE standards or increased fuel taxes, then weigh the supposed perfect choice against its purported political consequences as if this were the sole rationale for rejecting a logically flawed dichotomy. Give us a break.

This but-for-all-the-muck rationalization is so pervasive that it needs attention. The perfect world not only does not exist, it cannot possibly exist. The knowledge of some god-like being would be required to make such suppositions, and I am unaware of such an economic genius. We should banish such foolish ideas from our conversations about economics, since they are always offered as a back-door idealism, which is dangerously misleading. Moreover, the ideal economic model seems always to be opposed to the real world of democratic politics and pluralistic societies.

If only markets were perfectly efficient, people completely rational, and stubborn political sentiments absolutely constrained ... we would live in an ant hill. The abstraction of economic decisions so far from what actually occurs in our wonderfully messy and contingent existence as human beings has caused more harm than pure ignorance of economics might ever have foisted. Marxism, laissez-faire capitalism, war-machine fascism, and lately dogmatic free-market abdication of social responsibility are all consequences of the risible idea of the "perfect world."

Real world policies weigh real commensurable trade-offs, not spurious idealizations. Poor people bear the heaviest burden of gas taxes. When they pay at the pump out of their minimal resources, they cannot carry a loss forward to the next accounting period or improve their OOP costs by trading that old, inefficient junker for a new class of vehicle, while depreciating the expense in rough balance with the amortization. They just don't get as much food or health care or heat or whatever else is needed right then. This isn't a political problem. This is an existential problem.

Reducing economic theories to trade-offs between so-called idealistic circumstances ignores the real, human costs of policy decisions. We can no longer afford to let such academic analyses mislead us into wasting time of irrelevant idealisms.