Actually, for purely selfish reasons I'd rather Maddow didn't get her own show. She's been a great sub for Olberman. She's arguably more articulate than Keith, and she probably would have been a great cohost if Keith were willing to share the position. However, there just isn't any way I'm going to devote another full hour every single damn day to watching political commentary.

So, I'm sure she's going to be great on a show I don't have time to watch, and Keith's next sub will probably be nowhere near as good as Rachel was. I had the same mixed feelings when Stephen Colbert got his own TV show.

It's already been said by other letter writers, but I'm going to repeat it because it is important. Statistical data samples based on voluntary responses are almost useless. People who claim to be journalists who are reporting on this kind of "data" have an obligation to point this out if they want to be respected in their opinions. If you look on page five of the link to the article, it says right there:

Respondents do not constitute a probability sample.

And yes, I do expect journalists, along with all other educated people, to have some understanding of what consitutes valid statistical data and what doesn't - because when it comes down to it, a lot of our decision making these days is based on statistics.

It seems like an unfortunate number of responses to this article just want to tell off the poor guy who is asking for help. Telling someone how horrible they are and that they need to "grow up" doesn't really seem that helpful to me. Perhaps some of these angry letter writers are venting over issues in their own lives?

Anyway, Mr. Ranter, I suspect you are a very focused person - good at concentrating on a single issue until you beat it into submission. Maybe what you need to do is learn how to distract yourself when the situation calls for it - how to use moments of forced downtime to shift your focus mentally to keep yourself entertained (some less enlightened souls call it "goofing off"). You could try to remember old jokes, or make aesthetic judgments about the ceiling tiles, or even bore your kids with old stories (years later they'll appreciate it).

Don't wait for your greatest moments of rage to try this technique, because it will be very hard to do then. Practice shifting into self distraction when you notice you are being just a little bit inappropriately obsessive. Over time you might get good enough at shifting your focus that you'll be able to do it even when you really need to - like when plans go awry and you can't stop ranting, etc.

Good luck.

I feel like some misconceptions need to be corrected in a couple of the letters:

1. If you read Ms. Lay's sample chapter, she says that her 1350 calorie diet will result in a weight loss of at least a pound a week (this statement is in the last page of the sample chapter). Therefore I assume the diet she describes is not intended strictly as a maintenance diet.

2. The diet she described included egg salad, peanut butter, and a serving of turkey for dinner, so I'm not sure why somebody said her diet didn't include enough meat or protein. Also, the veggies she mentioned should be a pretty good source of calcium (where do you think cows get it?).

Anyway, without actually having read the book it seems a little premature to make too many judgments about it.

How many dramas are there on television now that aren't some sort of crime show or medical show? Seriously, wouldn't Lost or Battlestar Galactica have to get pretty damn awful before they could be half as bad as watching yet another CSI clone or "Hot Doctor" show? I'll take muddled and confusing over "been there, done that, about a zillion times" any day of the week.

Newt's underlying thesis is if we let AIG fail, then that will teach them a lesson. But the question is, who exactly would we be schooling? The execs who drove the company under are going to just take whatever salaries and bonuses they have earned to date and go on to another job. As for the shareholders - they have already lost 90+% of their share value, so going down to zero value hardly makes much difference to them.

The execs at AIG made a lot of money by selling insurance against the possibility of a tanking market while knowing that they would never be able to pay it off if the buyers needed to collect. For the AIG execs it was a no lose bet, because who cares if their company tanks - they're just after their next commission/bonus/whatever before they move on to their next job.

Still, some of these guys must have know what they were doing was fraud. If you really want to teach some people a lesson, then send some of these guys to jail

Yes, it is true that Hollywood has a weird tendency to cast women as mothers to men who are barely younger than them. But still, some of the examples used in the article were simply beyond stupid. For instance, in Forrest Gump Sally Field starts the film playing the mother of Forest as a child. If a character arc spans a number of years, filmmakers will understandably cast an actor who is closer to the lower age of the character because it's a lot easier to make someone look older than to make them look younger. The same thing can be said of Elizabeth Taylor in Giant - which had a storyline that spanned half a century or so.

Come on Salon - can you please stop trying to support valid points with really, really invalid examples... please?