Off-topic, but I just saw the jaw-dropping "telling it like it is...open door policy...'cept when she's busy blogging" ad where Salon's Editor-in-Chief advertises...herself. Salon has been reduced to running ads congratulating itself on its own pages.

Are you really not able to step outside yourself and see how pompous and actually sort of sad that looks? Then again you can't see how you compromise your integrity when you offer up soft, fluffy interviews to your 'moderate' *cough* religious buddies (Karen Armstrong, Anne Lamot, Tariq Ramadan) while only pulling out the real, play-no-favourites journalism when 'mean-spirited' rationalist like Sam Harris or slimy reactionaries like Dinesh D'Souza show up.

The my-head-is-too-large-for-my-body caricature proves to be a surprisingly accurate depiction. Thank you for reminding me why I dropped my paid subscription.

...and miss another example of Salon's sad descent into irrational, unquestioning worship of 'victims' of the War on Terror.

Only Salon in the Joan Walsh Era could produce utter detritus like this which has no novel or thought-provoking aspects. Really this guy Kurth is just a immature, arrogant jerk and his attempt to pass of the initial event as an over-reaction the UK/airline's part is just mind-boggling. Follow clear rules when travelling, avoid vicious, drunken abuse of innocent parties and voila -- no problems. Joan Walsh should be personally ashamed this was given a green light to publish.

As Kashmira beautifully elucidated in a letter which ought to have beern starred, we have a case here of a gay man who through out the article plays up his supposed solidarity with Islam, a religion which condemns him to death for being who he is. Again only Salon could find that combination anything but absurd, hypocritical and pitiable.

The irony lost on the Salonista crowd is that the fragmented nature of British society which Kurth mocks is the result of the multiculturalist cult of victimhood which has defined New Labour and the post-liberal American Left. I lived in the UK for 2 years and was sickened by the white, university-educated class who actually thought interviening in domestic violence and other issues like forced marriage in the "Asian" (i.e. Muslim) community was 'racist'. When everyone is inexorably defined by the 'group' into which they are born and bases their politics off of their sense of 'oppression' you get a society where people feel no connection with one another and can hope for only non-violent co-existence at best. Hence Free Expression takes a back-set to not giving offense. The government nicely fills that vacuum in civil society with laws, regulations, bureaucracy and penalties. No one familiar with the Uk could be remotely surprised at the fate which befell Kurth.

Salon of six or seven years ago used to have thought-provoking articles.

Now its an endless parade of anti-Bush stories which are so filled with bile and/or mindlessly repetitive that no matter how much I agree with the basic points of the authors are simply loathsome to endure. Add to this the weekly anti-Israel story like clockwork, couched in the false premise of being gutsy and novel. My personal favourites are the sadly less frequent victim worship articles for which Peter Kurth established a new nadir for just the other day.

Oooh, don't forget to use your advert space to extol your receipt of this utterly meaningless award. As if your ego weren't bloated enough already...

to the conclusion that you are a trivial, self-obsessed and insecure person. Whatever this comedic incident you refer to, it has no place as a headline commentary at Salon or any news/current events oriented site. I like Stephen Colbert and his comedy but what he does is not news, it is trivia. Thank you again for ruining what had great promise to be an island of rationality and seriousness in a sea of news as infotainment.