for bloggers? After all, it's not as if all journalists have agreed to meet one set of standards or expectations.

Many journalists began by working for candidates or on capitol hill; some did the reverse. I will admit that I was pretty mad at George Stephanopoulos for quite awhile; in any other field that would have been considered trading on one's "inside information."

However, blogging appears to me more like a new system of laboratories, some cooperating, some not, some with grant funds, some without. Surely, the transparency that is required of researchers (reveal your funding sources and/or seemingly potential conflicts of interests) should be enough in the blogosphere for now.

Too soon, the bloggers' world will become just one more hardened institution, after more shifts and settlements occur, power dynamics change, and others have to adjust themselves to the new environment. Let's not force it to happen too soon. Does anyone really want to see blogs become institutionalized before their time? ;~)

As for criticisms of Salon... I've had them, too. Still, I remind myself of who and what kept me sane beginning in early 1998 when the right-wing noise machine and cable news made their bones with Clinton. There was little else out there in the wilderness. I would click over multiple times each day, looking for Joe Conason's column, published on west coast, not east coast time. Just consider how much Salon has had to change/alter/adjust itself merely to stay in business. How many of us could reinvent ourselves so many times. And how many writers have left Salon for bigger and greener fields. Instead of calling them as sell-outs, how about thinking of them as infiltrators. They could be. We don't know yet. Salon may not be perfect, but it's still a pretty good laboratory (tho' I prefer the term wetlands) for experimenters and self-re-inventors, especially when compared to the rest of the journalistic real estate. Glenn Greenwald is here now! Camille Paglia is back! Just think about the lively discussions and comment threads we have to anticipate!

...since they are so small and not as likely to have accumulated much mercury.

I prefer them with the bones, for calcium, since I can't have dairy, but they are also available skinned and boned, and even fresh during the proper season of the year.

If you think they sound too unappetizing, I'll bet you haven't tried putting them into a bowl of hot soup. Think if it as a "convenience" chowder you can have at lunch. White or red, depending on whether you use a potato soup or tomato/vegetable. (The canned sardines don't really need additional cooking-- and you wouldn't want to heat them in a microwave at work anyway.)

The most important thing for me about the canned variety is to get them in olive oil, rather than in soybean oil, both for taste and best nutritional benefits.

As for the study, were shellfish included?

...and if Greenwald is responsible for this, it's just one more reason to welcome him to Salon, besides the fact that it simplifies my online reading.

This has been a great discussion-- I only wish I had something substantial to add to it, but I don't.

However, I can add a technical hint... many people probably have access to Lexis/Nexis without realizing it.

If you work in (or attend) a university or other academic setting, you may have access through the institution's online library portal. (That's where I get access.) You may even have some sort of online access rights as an alum. Even a small subscription as an alum would yield far more benefits than just Lexis (e.g., there's often an OED link).

Also, I may be mistaken, but I believe that public libraries will often/sometimes have online access to Lexis. From there, you could email stuff to yourself using yahoo or some other web email.

Although I am perfectly willing to pay for my Salon subscription, I really rebelled when the Times put their columnists behind the pay wall. (Ironically, I think they now play a smaller part in the online political dialogue, which in a few cases, really is too bad.) So, about every week or ten days, I log on and find them through Lexis.

...given that you have to use some kind of combustible "fuel" to produce, harvest and refine it, I would still welcome its disappearing from our food chain. Sodas are bad enough with plain old sugar in them, but HFCS is far worse, and it is not content to inhabit sodas, but is found in waaay too many foods.

If using corn to produce ethanol makes it less available (i.e., too expensive) for the food industry... then Hooray!

How can anyone look at the graphs of HFCS consumption and obesity (among other conditions/diseases) and not see at least a correlation?

[A few months ago I gave up root beer because it was too hard (and expensive) to find it without HFCS, and I can already tell that my stomach is a bit flatter. No other changes.]