I absolutely agree with the message here. Parents of girls can easily start to counter these insane marketing messages with pre-schoolers, as I am doing with my daughter. I devote a lot of energy to finding clothing for her that is cute, colorful and sassy but not, as my neighbors and I always say, "hoochie-mama" (my child is 3 and a half). You would be surprised how much hoochie-mama crap is marketed in a size 4T. I will not buy anything with animal prints or anything else that it looks like it belongs on a teenager. I refuse to purchase "Hannah Montana" underwear (which is practically all you can find). There is even "Bratz" underwear for kids my daughter's age. It is complete insanity and it needs to stop!

When my daughter, who has dark brown hair and brown eyes, asks me for Barbie dolls, I talk to her about how all those dolls look the same. They are all blonde with blue eyes, and everyone does not look that way. Not everyone is thin like that, and that is OK. I tell her how boring it would be if everyone looked the same. By starting this conversation now, I hope to help her avoid feeling bad about herself, regardless of what she looks like. Also, I'm helping her to develop critical faculties about the advertising she sees, so she'll be empowered to make her own buying decisions when she's older. I think the importance of this kind of "early intervention" can't be over-rated.

Nothing wrong with Dunkin' as long as I can keep them from automatically adding sugar. Superior taste to Starbucks for half the price.

So people who are obvious, total idiots--people who SELF-IDENTIFY as idiots ("I know it sounds stupid, but Barack 'Hussein' Obama?") are poised to define our national priorities once again, it seems. At a certain point these people get what they deserve by voting the way they do.

They're too dim to make the connection between the shuttered storefronts in their downtowns and the giant Wal-Marts down the road, and it's just too taxing on them to figure out that the claims made in a viral e-mail ("Obama is a Muslim! He wants to kill your babies!") are false. So they vote Republican against their own interests. At this point I have zero sympathy for these people. They gave us George Bush, and they just might give us John McCain and Sarah Palin.

What IS tragic is that the rest of the country, and indeed the rest of the world, will suffer unimaginable horrors if McCain and Palin, the king and queen of anti-intellectualism, manage to win the election with the help of these hopeless morons.

This is one of the best pieces I've read in Salon in years. Bravo Michael Lind!

Helmets and knee pads to protect your toddler inside your house? Ridiculous, as I think most would agree. But letting a 9-year-old ride a subway by himself? I don't know about that one. I bet many of those defending the author's right to do this would never in a million years put their own 9-year-old kid on a subway alone. I sure wouldn't.