pray tell, do you propose for the French government to determine whether an "abusive" husband is "forcing" his wife to don the burqa and mouth religiousity or if a "devout and submissive" wife is merely practicing her conscience and religion as she sees fit?

Perhaps Sarkozy can sit in the marital home and watch the couple's interactions, and probe into the brainwashed females' brains to determine the level of "voluntariness" found within.

Your idea of "punishing" these "abusive" husbands while allowing those free-spirited burqa-donning Muslim women to practice as they see fit is untenable.

Either you go the route that Sarkozy is exploring, by banning the public burqa, or you go the route that the United States does, and don't inquire into the matter as long as there is no physical assault or kidnapping on the man's part.

By the way, the burqa is not a "veil." We're not talking about a hijab or even an abaya, which is commonly confused with the burqa, we're talking about a walking body-bag. Only the most oppressive of Islamic sects and communities mandate the burqa for women. Not even Saudi Arabian women commonly wear the burqa.

or maybe they do, there's a number of variations of burqas, chador, and abaya from the most shapeless and eyeless Afghan type burqas to more open cloaks.

But the point is that these types of garments are not the norm for the vast majority of the international Muslim community. You would be hard-pressed to pick out these types of garments in a street photo from Iran or Pakistan.

If anything the prosecutors were working extra hard on him.

For a first-time offender with a clean criminal record, where the victim is not the complainant and is not cooperating, it is not terribly unusual for charges to be dropped altogether. They got a felony conviction, five years probation, and a stay-away order. That is quite an accomplishment. If they took it to a jury trial, it would not only be putting the victim through that ordeal against her wishes, but it would be seriously risking an acquittal, which would let him off scot-free.

1. Looking ain't no crime.

2. This is a snapshot still. It is impossible to tell whether Obama is sneaking a peek (as if anything were wrong with that) or just got photographed at an angle and instant in time during which a woman's butt intruded his field of vision.

Is there some kind of law at Salon that the writers (especially the women writers) must love bacon and give it mad props in unrelated articles? Can we expect Pork Week to become an annual affair?

You only have to be a lawyer to be a member of the federal judiciary itself, except, interestingly, the Supreme Court. The only qualification for the Senate Judiciary Committee is to be a senator.

Other Judiciary non-lawyers include Tom Coburn (doctor, not a lawyer) and Chuck Grassley (farmer).

What is supposed to be the protocol for "artifacts" left on graves?

Maybe I'm biased as a member of a natural burial association, whose rules don't allow for leaving anything on graves other than local rocks or wildflowers that naturally biodegrade, but are they supposed to go about daily and permanently archive everything?

What is a family member who leaves a letter or photo on a grave exposed to the elements supposed to expect, that it will be taken up into the heavens?

I guess we'll get the answer in tomorrow's installation. But pardon me for finding those particular allegations a bit bizarre. I don't understand how someone abandoning an object in public, even on a grave, has a stake in where it ends up, as long as there's no intentional desecration involved.

A sensational headline, no doubt, but it sounds like Salon latched onto a disgruntled ex-employee raising a stink and made a story about it. Her old boss doesn't sound like a great charmer, but the premise of the article is overblown. Who knows from this article what the real basis for the dispute was. It looks like Higginbotham broke protocol and the cover-up was worse than the "crime." Obviously Gray had no right to either privacy or personal usage of her government-issue computer.

As for the allegations of mismanagement, it chalks up to an allegedly-less-than-spectacular project to digitize records for one of the nation's largest cemeteries, some alleged clerical errors (the extent of which is not asserted beyond that it at most possibly involves only a tiny fraction of the gravesites), and what the author and, seemingly, Gray consider to be less than worshipful treatment of ephemera deposited on gravesites. Comparing this to the Vietnam Memorial is kind of disingenuous. The Vietnam Memorial is not a cemetery and is a tiny fraction of the size of Arlington. Whatever the value of warehousing items left there in some Maryland office park, scaling that approach up to Arlington would be an entirely different matter and a very questionable use of limited resources.

The most telling line is where Gray says, "The aesthetics of the cemetery are deceptive. To the naked eye, it is a place of sacred beauty and a tribute to our nation's heroes, but if you scratch below the surface, you will find that it's really just window dressing. They've put these pretty curtains up to hide the ugliness on the inside."

Apparently it is a place of ugliness to her, because she was fired and had a lousy work relationship with her superior. But she admits that it's beautiful and well-kept—a place of honor and respite to the public and soldiers it serves. Whatever legitimate beef she may or may not have from working there and/or not getting her way, the cemetery exists to serve the memory of the veterans and their families, not its staff.