Teenage girls. . .are hiring -- or prevailing upon their anxious, doting parents to hire -- image consultants.

"Teenage girls...are hiring image consultants" impresses me as misleading in that it makes it sound as if this is some broad-based (hey...an unintentional pun!) phenomenon. If you'd written "the spoiled brat spawn of the indulgent rich are hiring image consultants", I suspect you'd be closer to the mark. Regardless, it seems clear from a slew of posts these past weeks that Salon's Broadsheet is once again reverting to the Great Pink (irrelevant) ghetto. Please stop.

...for the duration. When things get green and really start growing again, we won't need microscopic analysis to tell us that it's so. And given the way that all of the "green shoots" back to spring have turned out to be mold on a decaying corpse, it just seems prudent to put the term away.

Second, take a hard look at the birth-death model and the fact that for months, the adjustment made according to this model (jobs being added) have been the highest in history. (See http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2009/06/king-report-more-bls-chicanery/ or click my sig for an article on this from early June.)

Next (OK...make it three things), even as we saw claims fall last week, the hours worked also continued to fall. Historically, hours worked increases (because employers had rather make full use of current employees instead of going to the trouble and expense of hiring/training new employees) before unemployment turns around. What do the hours worked look like this week?

(T)hese numbers, valid or not, still move markets.

Utterly irrelevant crap. Sometimes I wonder if you venture far out of your way to pull these ridiculous nuggets, or if you come by them naturally. In either case, such statements that are so far from the actual point leave me wondering if you have a clue.

Our aim is to cast a spotlight on news that puts women in the center...Broadsheet will be taking the ladies seriously, whether that means tracking news about how our rights are holding up, how well we're representing ourselves politically, or how the advertising world has decided to address us, what kinds of health advances are ahead of us -- all the news of our (usually) two-steps-forward, one-step-back march to equality. . . . We'll also have celebrity dish and possibly fashion news.

Seems to me that it's time to reconsider what Broadsheet (or, as we called it on Table Talk at the time, the Great Pink Ghetto) is supposed to be in light of what it has actually become. I check in here for reasons I don't fully understand but what I see is mostly dreck on the level of what I might see staring back at me from the covers of tabloids in the supermarket. Occasionally there is a cogent take on actual issues, but there seems to be an abundance of drivel that's obsessed with porn (either for or against), celebrity gossip and all the stuff that makes up the stereotypical image of women's fluff. Sad.

I'm not sure what the point of the entry on Ryan O'Neal was supposed to be. If the point was anything other than empty-headed gossip of an utterly useless nature, the writer missed the mark. By a mile.

Randy Weaver? Joan, why on earth are your bringing up the utterly shameful (to US federal law enforcement) episode of Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge? Do you have any real idea of what happened there? A quick Google search on Gerry Spence Randy Weaver (http://bit.ly/1pc8Re) turns up the story. It's my hope that you will take the time to read Gerry Spence's account.

As far as Kostric and "drug dealers", you look to be really stretching. It's patently obvious that Kostrick was referring not to dealers/pushers (or whatever you want to call them) but to people growing the ganja in their homes/on their property and being burst upon by federal agents for a plant. If you want to do some searching there, you'll find numerous deaths of perfectly innocent citizens who were killed by the feds.

Kostric may not be your kind of guy, and you may not agree with him, but he broke no laws. Your rant is off base and is exactly the sort of thing that plays into the fears of people who are honestly concerned about things like liberty, adherence to the constitution and preservation of rights in what often seems to be a nation moving towards a police state.

Kostric no doubt believes many, many things that you and I do not. But your attempt to smear him by association is pure fallacy.

Example: I vote Democratic (or tend to anyway.) The Democratic Party supports the death penalty. By your logic, that would mean I support the death penalty. I do not. In fact, I strongly oppose it.

The Democratic Party supports the war in Afghanistan and Iraq. (Yes, they do. Their votes in congress and the actions of our current president make it clear.) I oppose both.

And as far as cops bursting in with no-knock warrants in full para-military regalia with the deaths of non-violent (and often utterly innocent) people sometimes resulting? Sorry, but if someone bursts in like that, the fundamental human right of self defense applies.

Stop the scare mongering. You're beginning to sound like the mirror image of a Republican.