Being a vegan and an animal rights activist, I'm appalled by foie gras, as I am appalled by all animal flesh on a plate, not because it involves torture, but because I don't believe that I have any moral right to condemn an animal to birth and death when I don't have to.

The main issue of animal rights is that the animals with whom we share this planet have the right to determine their own fate, and our simply being human does not grant us an automatic mantle of superiority or lordship over them. Treat them nicely, put them in a gilded cage, it doesn't matter - you are still using them for your own ends (and eventually killing them).

It's funny that so many of you have written such nasty things about PETA, when PETA is not an animal rights organization at all. Their most public campaigns are always about animal welfare, i.e., trying to get some kind of "humane" treatment for cattle or hens or whatever, and are not generally about the abolition of animal agriculture. Their campaigns, such as those against Burger King or KFC, usually result in a kind of partnership with these animal-killing organizations, whereby the animal killers make some token welfare gestures and PETA gets to declare "victory" and raise more money. PETA is concerned firstly with publicity for themselves and token animal welfare issues a distant second at best.

It's sad that many of you seem to confuse animal welfare with animal rights, and PETA certainly has helped confuse that issue. There are many people (like many of the writers at Salon) who will happily tell you that they only buy animal flesh from small or organic or whatever farms, and yet I doubt any of them would characterize themselves as animal rights activists.

So, to Koppelman and others who are reading and responding, I say this: please stop confusing the two very separate issues - a vegan's ethical belief in animal rights and a foodie's token concern about animal welfare - as this article so painfully does.

It'd be nice to see the politically outspoken Rick Steves interviewed in this article on his own show sometime.

At some point we have to begin to let our elected officials speak off-the-cuff without turning it into news. They are people, after all, not gods.

Bush's jokes about finding the WMD, for instance, were prepared remarks with an accompanying slideshow. The outrage at those remarks was deserved. Dick Cheney swearing into an open mic, on the other hand, was the kind of accident anyone might make, and never deserved to be news.

The reason that only the people with the most enormous egos and insufferable god complexes choose to run for public office these days is because we continue to treat every single gaffe, non-sequitur and bad joke that comes out of their mouths as news. Treat them like human beings, on the other hand - don't obsess about their every utterance - and then maybe, just maybe, they would spend more time doing real work for their country.

After reading this piece and all of the responses so far, all I can say is this:

End all political parties (vote for individuals you like, not parties), have publicly funded elections with a limited campaign season (three months tops), scrap the electoral college, vote with paper and pencil, and have all the political operatives be trash collectors instead.

Ah do declare, miracles do happen. Salon, normally a purveyor of the Michael Pollan/happy meat mindset, has actually published a piece with something of a sympathetic take on veganism.

Now to sit back and watch the anti-vegan comments start rolling in.

They will all be variations on these themes: being a veg*n is unhealthy or unnatural; there will never be a day when I/most people/the entire planet goes veg*n; I was a veg*n once and I had a medical problem; I was a veg*n once and the food was boring; I tried being a veg*n without any advance preparation and I failed; veg*ns are sissy wimps; veg*ns are self-righteous idiots; I knew a veg*n once who was a horrible person or who didn't follow their own rules, therefore all veg*ns are just like that; hmmmm boy, I love the taste of carcass and anyone who tries to take that away from me is a commie pinko.

See, now I've saved you the trouble of having to read any more comments. You're welcome.

Why is this glorified karaoke contest still on the air? And why do people keep giving in to watching it?

Don't succumb to this cretinous juggernaut - change the channel.

Makes all that election rhetoric about restoring honor and dignity to the White House even more galling.