If you impose the death penalty for child molesters - no matter how much you want to kill them, and I know exactly how you feel about this - most cases will never even GET to trial, let alone result in convictions. Do you really think that your family would have been more likely to report your uncle if they knew he would DIE as a result? No, even less likely. And it doesn't sound like they were that likely to report him even without that. Mostly they were afraid of being associated with such a scumbag, so they pretended it wasn't happening. My mother was raped by her brother, who also molested his own children on a regular basis. He is still alive and well, a retired prison guard in fact. Welcome to the REAL WORLD of sex offenders - not that world we wish we lived in, where we could identify and remove from circulation all the nasty people who want to hurt our babies. Too many of them are people who are related to us and are betraying our trust in the worst way. And we are letting them. Getting to the point where we don't let them anymore is the real sex offender battle.

As for those who are caught molesting strangers, I am in favor of permanent incarceration. Not out of revenge, but because they are incurable. Get the drug addicts into rehab and make room for those who actually hurt other people. But in a Republican universe, we don't have funding for things like that. Only for bombs and stuff. Talk about perversions.

"I doubt the AP's theory that Basra was a shining oasis of tolerance before the war."

I don't think that's exactly what it said, but what reason do you have to doubt that Basra was more civilized before we deposed Saddam and began our occupation? Why should I see that Mikes Pace "doubts" something and decide to believe him instead of believing what an AP reporter in Basra has to say?

"But,

Who is Janice Dickinson?"

And who is Tyra Banks?

Yeah, this is why I usually don't read the celeb posts.... But it did sound like a joke, unless whoever Tyra Banks is IS actually on the plump side. Is she?

Actually, I think women are harder on themselves than they are on each other, generally. The biggest PR mistake of the century for feminism has been letting the Right get away with painting us as anti-male. In fact, the most anti-male women in my life and in the media are not feminists; they're very comfortable with deeply entrenched gender roles, including their own self-hatred and their competitive hatred of other women.

And MAV, it is not shallow to keep your finger on the pulse of the still-healthy anti-fat campaign of women against themselves. You won't see the Broadsheet writers posting snarky headlines about celebrities' orange peel and cellulite here; but commentary on sites that do that is expected and - for those of us who would not otherwise see such sites and therefore not know what kind of world our girls and boys are really growing up in - welcome. I don't usually read them, as there is usually much more interesting commentary on topics that are much closer to my heart, like reduced access to contraception for poor women. There is no fixed page or word count here, so there's room for all of it.

He's a PowerPoint presentation.

Agreed, galanolwe, you don't have to go all the way to YouTube to get bad info on vaccines. My favorite Mothering magazine article is the one about the dangers of ultrasound. The thesis amounted to, "Well, it IS a kind of radiation, you know." That said, we didn't get whimsical ultrasounds - not because we thought it would directly harm our babies but because the medical profession is inclined to base life-altering decisions on small bits of overanalyzed, micromanaged information. And as other posters have pointed out, the medical-industrial complex isn't exactly a bastion of purity and goodness. Perhaps if the industry didn't have the stench of blood money about it, we'd be less likely to listen to quacks.

don't they practice ritualistic cannibalism on a weekly basis?

What do you mean I'm attacking Catholics! If you read the full context of my remarks, you can see that I was trying to say that doctrinal issues are irrelevant to this campaign. Why, even Jews should be allowed to hold public office. So what if they DO have horns?

Sorry, huckster, you're not fooling anyone - least of all those of us who grew up Southern Baptist and know exactly how you and yours feel about religions that are unlike yours. Hey - don't you guys believe that wives should obey their husbands and children should be beaten with rods? Not that that's relevant....

I can't even look at the man without getting the heebie jeebies. If it looks like a preacher, talks like a preacher, and acts like a preacher ... don't elect it!!!

comes in a 7-pair packet: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday.

Anything else written on underwear is just bizarre. And Santa? A child-centric old man who creeps into the house at night and whose gifts are dependent on my having been "nice" all year long? I don't want him on, in, under or anywhere *near* my knickers. Ew.

The slogan itself is vaguely funny and more than vaguely mindless, but would be completely inoffensive on a t-shirt. I can't imagine whose idea it was to put it on underpants. My guess is that the underwear - like everything else at Wal-Mart - was made in a Chinese sweatshop. The people making it probably didn't even know what it said, so it could be they just have a bunch of slogans that they put on a bunch of different clothing and this one landed in unfortunate circumstances.

I repeat: Ew.

I was thinking "The Ennightenment." It's more Orwellian.

Or, how about "Global Dimming"?