Yeah, there are people who have made sex work their career and feel good about it.

But they are a minority. Most hookers work the street, and their lives suck, big time. They ain't pulling down $5000 an hour, by any means.

I don't give a shit about Spitzer, one way or the other, but I do care about all the Jane Does working the stroll. Violence and drug addiction are the least of it, really.

Yes, this was me: http://lettersfromjohns.blogspot.com/2008/01/im-not-john.html

Yes, Johns are the bad guys here, let us at least be clear about that.

It isn't an entirely a gender based issue except it's men that are buying. Men.

Thankyou for your post.

I think it is a relatively small subset of men. I sure hope so anyway.

I confess to being profoundly troubled by this issue.

As a parent of a child that had some issues that seemed pretty severe at the time, I am even more troubled.

As a supporter of Robert Latimer and a parent's right to make hard decisions without being second guessed, I still find myself very troubled.

Would it be ok to castrate a boy with similar issues? Would anybody seriously propose doing so?

Medical interventions can be a real horror shop. At the end of the day I think we are probably best off not to intervene in any way at all. And then I look at my daughter, where the medical intervention basically saved her life and brought her towards something pretty close to "normal".

But I don't know, hesitant to judge a parent as I am, I still find this situation very very troubling. Sickening in fact.

Me, I like text, but that is just me maybe, I like being able to skip stuff, or go back if I want to look at it two or three times if I want, cut and paste it if it comes to that, you know, being part of an empowered engaged non-passive audience and all that. Video is all about you sit back and listen passively, it is all the one to many paradigm, which is not what the internet is, I have heard from time to time.

I get the sense everybody is dot.com bubbling it again, video is the next big thing, better get on the bandwagon. Is Salon seriously looking into social networking next? Gotta get on that Web2.0 (I just added the ".0" to be pretentious) wave, right? Is Salon seriously aspiring to be some version of youtube, except only staff can post vacuous pointless posts like this one?

If it is a wagon, for Salon this is a wagon with very little cargo, and little point that I can really understand except for some kind of cargo cult type bandwagon (and possibly fake business synergy) affect.

Tracy, you are cute, love the eyebrows, and I seriously respect you as a serious writer, so why are you putting time and effort into something with so little content and value, and so far from all the things that make Salon interesting?

Just asking.

BTW, does Salon have plans for "reality" programming next? I hear that's the next big thing.

Is Salon and BroadSheet really aspiring to compete with http://www.webbalert.com/ ? Is it all about being a cute yet intelligent web chick commenting on the world?

On reflection, I think Salon should stream groovy lagging porn music on all pages. Except louder. And more Flash animations too. It would like totally enhance the total multimedia experience and be like completely Web2.0 and cutting edge and all.

Even though the article didn't mention Canada once, you do realize that the US imports more oil from Canada than anywhere else, by a rather large margin. And no mention of the tar sands either, where the proven reserves are equal to the rest of the world's combined (yes you read that right). (Incidentally, Venezuela has equally big deposits.) True, none of it is extractable at much below $30/barrel, and but an awful lot of it is at $100, and if/as the price goes up, more and more of it will come on line. The world ain't running out of oil any time soon, just cheap oil.

And good old Canada is actually pretty politically stable, first-world, western oriented, and has an economy that is not petro-dollar dependent. I guess it doesn't fit in with the story line very well.

Tar sands oil has a reputation as expensive oil, but average production costs these days are running at about $28/barrel, which puts some of the exotic fields the article discusses to shame. Royal Dutch Shell, in 2006, got an annual profit from its tar sands operations of a little under $22/barrel; it averaged a little under $12.50/barrel from its conventional operations.

I just don't see how you can have a discussion of "peak oil" and US energy imports without any mention of this at all.

And of course, neither any mention of the hideous environmental impact, particularly in terms of global warming gases, working the tar sands has.

It is in the campaigns' interests to whip up the speculation as to which would be better to defeat McCain, and it is in the media's interest too, to play up that the presidential campaign is a 50:50 proposition so that even the slightest edge will make the difference.

The problem is that this is all bullshit. Does anybody besides crazed diehard Republicans actually believe McCain has a snowball's chance in hell of winning against either candidate?