This article, which I thought was very insightful, just barely hints at the larger issue, which is of course why anyone in a world of 7 billion people chooses to have kids at all.

I understand the biological imperative for procreation, I just don't understand the personal or the cultural.

If the reason for you having kids is to change YOU somehow - i.e., make YOUR life better, make YOU a more well-rounded person, make sure that YOU live on - then that sounds to me like you see it as a kind of narcissistic self-help program. And so it's little wonder to me that you would end up being unhappy devoting so much time, attention and thought to someone else for so many years on end.

And if you have kids because you think you need to in order to be a real adult, or because everyone else does and therefore so should you, then you, too, will wake up one day and realize that parenting is not a guarantee of daily happiness.

I can cut you some slack for going along with societal pressure, but since you have your own brain, and presumably are capable of making your own decisions in life, my sympathy can only go so far.

And then there's marriage. Most people, when they're married, take vows that they will love and cherish their partner until death. But how does one reconcile this pledge of lifelong devotion with parenting? Do you love your children more than your partner, or less? Either answer has serious ramifications for yourself, your partner and your children. Is marriage, then, about being a loving couple, completely devoted to one other, or is marriage simply a construct under which one becomes a parent? Because the dirty little secret of our dysfunctional society is that loving, honoring, cherishing and so forth are nice words you utter on your wedding day, but when you're living through the terrible twos and working a full time job, there's actually no time or place in your daily routine for a loving, romantic marriage.

But we love romanticizing everything, including marriage and child rearing, and we're much better at promoting our comforting delusions than we are at talking openly about what life is actually like on a day to day basis.

Get married if you want to, have kids if you want to - just don't believe the delusions our society creates around these choices.

If the Republican noise machine is this vituperative this early in the Obama administration, good lord, what will they sound like one year from now? Three?

Never mind that they lost fair and square in the election. Never mind that every time they're handed the reigns they try and push through their agenda with religious fervor - the Gingrich Contract with America in 1994, Bush in 2000 believing the Presidency to be his sacred calling to restore honor and dignity to the White House, etc. And never mind that they spent eight years telling us that criticism of the President was unpatriotic, only to turn around and call for armed uprisings, political assassinations and civil war.

Never mind all that, because we have a system where after every big election someone is going to feel disenfranchised. In 2000 it was the Democrats' turn to feel left out, this time it's the Republicans'. That is the two-party, winner-takes-all system lorded over us by the two corporate parties which most Americans simply shrug and accept as canonical. Except, of course, that there is nothing at all in the Constitution about political parties.

Disband political parties, let people vote for the individual candidates they wish to and have publicly funded elections with limited campaign seasons. Allow for all viewpoints in government, not just two, and then, just maybe, people wouldn't feel so left out of their own government after every big election.

And perhaps some of this feeling of desperation in evidence coming from the right wing noise machine recently (or from Air America a few years ago), this my side winning/your side losing bullshit that the Dems and Repubs foster, would go away.

Letterman's jokes and the Playboy article are apples and oranges.

The Playboy article borders on advocating graphically described sexual violence, and the fact that it does so in a private, subscription-only print format only mitigates its reach (and potential influence on people), but does not excuse its rhetoric. It is blatantly inexcusable on its face and has no defense.

The Letterman jokes, on the other hand, were jokes about impropriety and famous people's personal lives, but they did not actually advocate any impropriety (or violence). You can say they were sexist - you can say a lot of things about them - but they were different in kind from the statements in the Playboy article, and I think the author conflating these two very different things was an intentional act on her part to make Letterman's remarks seem worse by association.

Letterman has been taken to task recently for being liberal, when in fact he's always been and continues to be a solidly center-right person (who kind of likes Obama). Therefore, call him sexist all you want, but when he makes fun of Sarah Palin, it's the center right talking to the far right, not the left talking to the right.