And if I had to choose between California being able to maintain its same-sex marriage laws last November or the election of our current president, I’d pick the latter.

Wow. What a wonderfully candid admission! The rights of individual gay and lesbian Americans don't matter to Bob Morris, as long as Bob Morris can help President Obama make the world a better place. Yeah, good luck with that. But ... for whom has Obama made the world a better place? Certainly not for gay and lesbian Americans: Obama's foot-dragging on gay and lesbian issues is approaching Clintonian dimensions.

Morris's sentiments throughout the piece come awfully close to "I've got mine, the rest of y'all can go fend for yourselves." (Gentle reader, you may substitute a slightly different verb for "fend for" if you desire.) In any case, it looks like Bob got exactly what he wanted. But I'm gay, too, and I'd much rather have seen same-sex marriage in California under President McCain than no same-sex marriage under President Obama.

I wear eyeglasses, and from my perspective the Real-D image produces considerable ghosting.

Those "laws of exchange-value" may be "inexorable," but they're hardly "mysterious." In order for something to have value, someone else has to want it. If nobody wants a thing, nobody trades for it, and the thing ends up with no value in the market. Laws of exchange value are really just measurements of how much people want something, and how much of some other thing they're willing to trade in order to have it. It's as simple as that.

Right now, American distributors simply aren't interested in Asian cinema. And that's because, if box-office returns and DVD sales are any indication, American audiences generally don't care for genre-bending monster mockumentaries, softcore ninja pornographers, or any of the other oddities that Asian audiences happen to enjoy. Mark it down to cultural differences if you must, but for the love of Buddha, don't blame capitalism. (After all, without capitalism, very few of the films you enjoy would have ever been made.)

More women playwrights, writing more plays. Yes, yes, absolutely yes. But better plays, too. Please.

Too many contemporary plays, by men and women alike, display little or no awareness of basic dramatic craft. And although I enjoy plays about "women's issues," I don't much care for dramas that tell me how I ought to vote (or ought to have voted). Save politics for the soapbox and Sunday sermons for the church pulpit.

My people use mustard, no chives allowed.

> Condoms fail at a rate of about 16 percent ....

By any chance, does Benfer teach "abstinence education" to gullible high-school students?

Kissling writes:

> But even today, the Catholic Church does not accept

> sexuality separated from procreation.

As it turns out, that's not true. The Catholic Church also recognizes a "unitive" purpose in sexuality. Sex can be an acceptable expression of the holy unity between man and wife, even if there's no chance whatsoever of procreation. So if your husband happens to be infertile or your wife is post-menopausal, the Church isn't going to condemn what you do between the sheets.

... by conservative women in politics.

I'll agree partially on DRAG ME TO HELL -- it's technically brilliant work, though colder than a Siberian Christmas.

Unfortunately, Sam and Ivan Raimi don't know much about foreclosures -- and to paraphrase Will Rogers, what they do know jest ain't so. Banks usually lose money on foreclosures and therefore forestall them for as long as they possibly can. "As long as they possibly can" becomes a much shorter period of time when half the financial sector implodes and a substantial minority of homeowners find themselves with "negative equity", but lending institutions still prefer not to foreclose on clients if there's any way it can be avoided. What's more, the properties banks do seize are often left by their former tenants in an uninhabitable condition, with fixtures, wiring and even plumbing removed. This effectively makes the properties unsellable, which means that banks lose even more money.

Still, when I saw DRAG ME TO HELL, I told my boyfriend, "Some idiot's going to think this is what banks really do." Looks like we have a winner, folks ...

As far as I can tell, we're objecting to comments posted in the feedback section of a fairly minor blog. If the Richmond police, the high-school principal, the district attorney, or some local politician were to cast these aspersions, I'd understand the outrage. But why get so worked up over a couple of online trolls?

Nobody who's anybody still believes that victims of sexual assault ought to be blamed -- unless of course a victim happens to be male and his rapist is not, in which case rape is customarily viewed as humorous but harmless.