Well, yes and no. I have no doubt that Bush & Co. intended to deceive. I am less convinced that they actually did deceive elected Democrats. Not long before the vote to give Bush the authority to go to war, I spoke with an aide to a Democratic Senator, who told me his boss was not convinced by the "evidence" that had been presented that war was the correct thing to pursue. As it turned out, only one Senator running for re-election in 2004, the late, great Paul Wellstone, voted "no".

It may be that all those Senators facing re-election or defeat were fully persuaded that war was the right course, or at least that they should give the President authority to go to war. But I am inclined to think that, whether they were fooled or not, they felt sure that their constituents were persuaded by what the President was putting out about mushroom clouds, etc., and that it would be electoral suicide to vote "no."

Paul Wellstone thought better of Minnesotans. It was a close election, but I feel certain that, had he lived, he would be in the Senate today.

This would be a wonderful vehicle for discussion of what Walter Wink calls "the myth of redemptive violence." Clearly David Brooks believes the myth; the Israelis and Palestinians are in the process of proving it a deadly chimera.

I was in the room, and I admired Anne Lamott for what she said and how she said it. The Baptist woman next to me and I high-fived. I circulated quite a bit during the several days of the meeting, and I feel sure that Catholics, though a strong presence, were not in the majority -- moreover, that not nearly all, or even a majority, of the Catholics present disagreed with her. The cheering sounded louder, from where I sat. You go, girl.

There was a second bad question in that same Zogby poll, to which I objected. It had to do with a list of "information" one might, or might not, want given to a woman asking for an abortion. The list included the so-called "connection" between abortion and breast cancer (NO!) and information about services and support available should the woman choose to deliver her child (possibly YES, if she's to make a genuine and informed choice).

Linda Maloney+

It's only anecdotal, of course, but I'll just note that the two brightest young women I've known in the last several years both chose women's colleges: Wellesley and Mount Holyoke. My younger son deliberately chose an all-male high school, then attended Hampshire College, where he took most of his concentration courses at Smith (through the Five College cooperative system). I worked for years at a men's college (St. John's University in Minnesota) that shares courses and other aspects of campus life with its nearby all-women associate, the College of St. Benedict. These cooperative arrangements work well, particularly in giving women space to develop interpersonal and leadership skills apart from the pressure of male-female dynamics, while still providing the rich depth of faculty and library resources that the combinations can yield. Women's colleges are also able, through special programs and by their simple existence, to stress women's achievements -- an example for their graduates to emulate and improve upon.

You miss the whole point. And if you don't think there is a different dynamic in mixed groups than in single-sex groups, I do wonder what society you live in.

I'm 67 and was part of the feminist movement from the start. Almost all my education after high school was in co-ed universities, but I still remember my all-women high school and a single commuter year at Mary Baldwin as "different." Was my high school "softer"? I dunno -- I was one of the first class of National Merit Scholars: what do you think? Was Mary Baldwin "softer"? Not that I can recall: my history and language classes there were probably tougher than what I'd had elsewhere, and best of all, they gave me women professors to admire and seek to emulate. (I'd had women professors at other institutions, but the signals that they were less prestigious than the males were all over the place.)

In one way, of course, all that was ruinous to me: I was sorely injured when I tried to act, in my later academic career, as though I were the men's equal!

Nonsense. Everybody knows that Vermont is God's country -- and we have soaring property prices to prove it!

Vermont, after all, has the Green Mountains, the Long Trail, breathtaking autumns (currently in progress), the best skiing, whitewater kayaking, sailing, snowboarding and snowshoeing, maple everything -- in Vermont, one tree in four is a maple, and we've got plenty of trees! -- moose, deer, bear, skunks (our top urban, or at least village, mammal, probably outnumbering dogs and cats), and History! We've got fossilized coral reefs, even.

And we've got Bernie Sanders, Howard Dean (occasionally), and Fred Tuttle. (Well, Fred's gone to God, but then, God's a Vermonter, so what's the difference?)

It being autumn, we've now got chicken pie suppers and apple picking. A white Christmas is a given. And come March, we've got Town Meeting, one of the last vestiges of what made America great to begin with: neighbor to neighbor, deciding together how to govern ourselves and what to spend our money on.

I've seen the country, and a good part of the world. Give me Vermont.