Surely you can do better than to publish this kind of "holier than thou" tripe.

The letters in response to this article are, for the most part, far better than the article. But those of Laurel1962, and VirginiaL pretty much nail it.

Does Siobhan Phillips expect us to don hairshirts for being unethical by birth? After all, we were born omnivores.

Last night I had guests for dinner. We feasted on Corn-fed Iowa prime rib, and non organic viggies and salad, all washed down with a Zin with phosphates in it. Mmmmmmm!!

There may well be good reasons to go vegan. But if it means donning the affectations of a yuppie like Siobhan Phillips, I'd rather be unethical.

Gibson isn't a Catholic. He belongs to an offshoot of the Catholic church, a schismatic and cultic sect which has been denounced by the Catholic Church.

Gibson funded his own church, the Holy Family Chapel, in Agoura, California. It is not affilliated with the Arch Diocese of Los Angeles. It's sole benefactor is Gibson, by the way, and in fact, the Holy Family Chapel sits on Gibson's land.

These facts have appeared, off and on, in the media for a number of years now. Kissling should have known this.

Arlen Specter a moderate? Please.

Glenn Greenwald had it right, yesterday, when he said that specter being viewed as a moderate is a measure of how far to the right the center has moved.

Some of you might be too young to remember, but we had a president during the 20th century who clarified this point of law for us:

"When the President does it, that means its not against the law"

for this great interview. What it does not touch on, though, is just how far into a kid's life this protectiveness now extends. Indeed, it continues into young adulthood.

When I was a senior in high school, faced with making a college choice, my friends and I would pile into a car and drive ourselves off to visit colleges and universities for an entire weekend...........by ourselves! Imagine that!

Today, high school seniors visit colleges and universities with mommy and daddy in tow, as if, even at 18, they're still not ready to make a major decision without input from mommy and daddy. What an awful disservice to a young adult!

If my parents had accompanied me on any of my college visits, I would have never, repeat, NEVER lived it down among my friends. I would have been ostracized from my social circle as a mommy's boy. And, make no mistake, my friends would have been right.

This is one of those articles whose letters are better than the article itself. Except for a few numbskulls (dickdworkin), the Salon audience is the equal of its writers.

But there is one problem here: political correctness, as evinced by the use of the word "gender." Its use betrays a subliminal puritanism that is afraid to use the word "sex."

Gender is a syntactical term:

"a set of classes that together include all nouns, membership in a particular class being shown by the form of the noun itself or by the form or choice of words that modify, replace, or otherwise refer to the noun, as, in English, the choice of he to replace the man, of she to replace the woman, of it to replace the table, of it or she to replace the ship. The number of genders in different languages varies from 2 to more than 20; often the classification correlates in part with sex or animateness. The most familiar sets of genders are of three classes (as masculine, feminine, and neuter in Latin and German) or of two (as common and neuter in Dutch, or masculine and feminine in French and Spanish)."

Sex is an anotomical term:

"–noun

1. either the male or female division of a species, esp. as differentiated with reference to the reproductive functions.

2. the sum of the structural and functional differences by which the male and female are distinguished, or the phenomena or behavior dependent on these differences.

3. the instinct or attraction drawing one sex toward another, or its manifestation in life and conduct.

4. coitus.

5. genitalia."

Lets get over our fear of the word sex. Gender is NOT used to distinguish between men and women. Sex is.

$2 Trillion over 10 years works out to roughly $666.00 per year for every man, woman and child in the U.S. if everyone were insured. Because they aren't, it's even higher per person.

If you believe these parasites are willing to concede that much dough, come on out to S.F. I have a couple of nice bridges I'll sell you. And if Obama actually believes it, he's too naive to be president.

In addition to Greenspan (whose admission of responsibility was luke warm, but still an admission), let's not forget that Bill Seidman, formerly the chairman of the RTC, has forthrightly admitted responsibility. If its good enough for him, it ought to be good enough for Summers.

that he can make his argument uninhibited by pesky things like contrary data. look at canada. look at france. look at japan. look closely.

Check your Edmund Burke. Check your Russell Kirk.

Douthat wants to stigmatize sexual freedom itself, not its outcomes. That's his real point. Giving his real wish a patina of concern for the happiness of women is a red herring.

Sexual mores have always been for the middle class. Always. Can't have them emulating the wealthy, who fuck as they please, what with all the time they have on their hands, and their ennui. After all, that might have an impact on the productivity of society. And, make no mistake, its the middle class who are the producers, not the wealthy, who are the beneficiaries of the productivity of the middle class.

And, as for the poor, who gives a shit what they do? Not the wealthy, for whom Douthat speaks.