You almost had me there... wondering if I should post a comment/letter about my Broadsheet being hijacked.

And on the same day when I read another reader's suggestion (which I can no longer find) that maybe other papers should also have a "chick" page... like Broadsheet. Or was it that men needed their own page? Anyway, I thought "yeah, sure, like that will keep the men from invading this space..."

I was referring to another comment (which I can no longer find) from another reader who seemed to wish for that...

Men commenting here is fine with me; it's only the women-hating trolls that have been such a pain.

So much for Stockholm Syndrome... from Bloomberg:

Freed U.S. Journalist Carroll Says Video Comments Were Coerced

April 1 (Bloomberg) -- Jill Carroll, the American journalist who was kidnapped in Iraq and held for 82 days, said her captors forced her to make a video calling for U.S. troops to be pulled out of Iraq.

``They told me they would let me go if I cooperated,'' Carroll wrote in a statement issued today by her employer, the Christian Science Monitor. ``I was living in a threatening environment, under their control and wanted to go home alive. I agreed.''

In the nine-minute video made before her release, Carroll, 28, said her captors were good people fighting an honorable battle. She said President George W. Bush knew the war was based on lies and should remove U.S. troops immediately. In her statement today, Carroll said those are not her views.

In an interview immediately after her release with Baghdad Television, a local channel run by the Sunni Muslim Iraqi Islamic Party, Carroll said she was not threatened by her captors. She contradicted that account as well today.

``Fearing retribution from my captors, I did not speak freely,'' Carroll said in today's statement. ``In fact, I was threatened many times.''

When I read an anecdote a few years ago in which DeLay insisted that he was entitled to smoke his cigar in a smoke-free federal building... I knew it was only a matter of time before he would be slapped down by fate or karma-- or something-- for over-reaching in his quest for unlimited power.

It occurred to me, while reading Smith's story, which I found touching, that this dilemma might actually be a man's equivalent to a woman's dilemma of trying to "have it all..." i.e., satisfaction in career, marriage, children, etc., although most men consider the career a given.

The dilemma for a man seems to be discerning whether he cares more about keeping his wife, i.e., the girl/woman he married, or having children whose job it would be to change the girl/woman he married into their mother. Empirical evidence-- and just plain anecdotes-- says he can't have both.

Most of the comments from husbands/fathers and other men that I have read on Salon's Broadsheet have complained-- often bitterly-- about losing their wives when they gained children. I'm not sure who complained more... those men with both wife and children, or those with only one or neither, but either way, it should give more women pause before agreeing to have children with the guys they married.

Ironically, Smith does sound like he'd be a great father, and that any changes for him might be welcome...

but what seems even more ironic to me now, while writing this, is the degree to which so many men complain of the changes that motherhood wreaks upon their wives, from whom motherhood usually exacts a much greater cost. Sure, having children changes absolutely everything for a couple, but not as much as a husband's or boyfriend's disapproval of the mother his wife has become does. Smith doesn't sound like that kind of guy... but he seems worried about it.