Glenn, the fact that you don't even read Dickerson, and your analysis of Paglia's irrelevance, has redeemed Salon at least in part. I will hold off deleting my bookmark -- actually, I'm shifting my bookmark over to your blog permanently.

I can't think of a better place to consider Salon's "Front Door" these days...

Keep up the amazing work.

Today's Daily "Salon Obama Bashing" is brought to you by Tim Grieve, who has found a tiny nugget of news with which to whack away at Obama.

Stay on that message, Salon staff. Joan is watching. And those tickets to Hillary's inaugural balls aren't going to get into your hot little hands all by themselves, now are they?

Pfffftttt.....

If, as you say, "Hillary Clinton's latest hawkish stance on keeping permanent bases there deserves more attention," how about getting Salon to cover this story, instead of giving more coverage to the RNC's efforts to defame Obama?

You refer to the "over-covered scuffle between Obama and Rev. Al Sharpton." Except in the fertile imagination of the credibility-challenged New York Post, and the utterly uncritical, unsourced and discombobulated mind of Debra Dickerson, there is no real "scuffle." It's very likely a manufacturered smear, designed to hurt Obama.

Until someone presents some factual reporting that establishes that this scuffle is for real, by talking about it as if it's a fait accompli and not some cockamamie theory, you and Salon are part of the smear effort. You are giving credibility to Dickerson's incoherent attack on Obama.

You say that you're "not personally enjoying the whole 'Is he black enough?' debate." But then, of course, Salon pretty much started it. As you say, the ridiculous "black enough" debate HAS been easily lampooned -- not only by Stephen Colbert, but by hundreds of Salon letter writers who can easily see through Dickerson's neuroses, and Salon's motives in publishing them. You're the editor. Edit. Otherwise, Salon's going to continue to be heading in the lampoon-worthy direction.

It's going to take more than one slightly passive-aggressive post about Obama to convince me that Salon is at least impartial about the Democratic candidates, and not shilling for Hillary. And paying wackadoos like Paglia to promote conservative hokum and smack down rational thinking and pretend the smackdown is "intellectual discourse" doesn't help the argument.

How about jettisoning Dickerson for writer who has their finger on the pulse of issues of interest to African-Americans and can write about them coherently?

And how about jettisoning Paglia, period?

That, and a consistent absence of underserved Hillary-worship and underserved Obama-bashing articles/blog posts, and maybe some of us will think that Salon hasn't totally drunk the Kool-Aid...

I happened upon Toni's "Taking Charge" book in my 30s when I was thinking about getting pregnant, and after I read it, I so wished I'd had it far earlier, because more than anything, it explained how the hormonal cycle worked -- information I never got from that "Now that you're a woman" booklet and filmstrip they showed us in the 6th grade.

I just finished reading a very simple book on puberty with my 9 year old daughter, and she already knows more practical, basic, sensible information about her body than I knew when I was a much older teenager.

So much for being a teenage Catholic girl, eh?

I went to a Catholic girls school, and it was ridiculous. Girls running around with no information, claiming to be virgins and doing everything but, and then having sex but not using birth control because "using birth control is a sin."

Clearly, avoiding the topic, failing to provide information, and telling teens that sex is immoral or a sin didn't work back then, in the 70s, and it doesn't work now, given our teenage sex rate.

You can bet I'm getting this book for my daughter when she's a teenager.

Girls and women deserve information, and Toni Wechsler is a FANTASTIC source...

She seems like a decent person. I know that I felt so much for her after the election loss, and then her announcement of the breast cancer, that I wrote her a personal note of support. (Can you imagine all the stress and fatigue of the election, then having it stolen away from you, and on top of THAT, having breast cancer diagnosed? What a bad time for her...)

I wrote to her that my mother had successfully survived breast cancer, and that there were many of us out here wishing her well, and that I could imagine she must be feeling pretty low.

Do you know that Elizabeth Edwards wrote back, by hand, a personal note of thanks, referencing what I'd said, and such.

Small thing, perhaps, but she has my respect forever for that.

And again, right now, my heart is going out to her in the hopes that it's not bad news about her health.

Harbinger,

I think Joan is basically doing the equivalent of covering her ears, and saying "La La La La La La La La La, I can't HEAR you!" really loud to herself.

As noted by a number of us, Debra Dickerson gets page views for Salon. And anything that gets page views for Salon is something Joan will keep around.

ESPECIALLY if it generates lots and lots of disgusted letters (ka-ching, more page views), and lots of people reading those disgusted letters (ka-ching, more page views), and even if it's right-wing nonsense that attracks links from people like Drudge (ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching, MANY more page views).

If anything, you can expect people on the Salon payroll like Dickerson or Paglia to continue to stir things up, ka-ching, generate those letters and page views, ka-ching, and then Joan will come in and write a passive/aggressive post about it which generates a lot of frustrated reader response, ka-ching, and so on.

I'm just waiting to see when Salon signs Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Paris Hilton, Abe Foxman, Ehud Olmert, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Lindsay Lohan, and Britney Spears as "columnists."

Don't laugh. It could happen.

Ka-ching....