First, there are different categories of female circumcision (recognized by the World Health Organization and the UN Population Fund), of which the first, the partial or total removal of the clitoral hood, is relevant to the comparison, so please do not accuse me of comparing a male circumcision to the complete destruction of the vagina or any of the horror stories that fit into the third category.

I'm sorry, but that's patently ridiculous. The horror stories are of course the reason why female circumcision is so roundly despised. I'm no fan of male circumcision, but trying to make a male/female comparision is grossly unfair to what they're doing to little girls. There should be no comparison, and you should stick your pet peeve somewhere else rather than trying to hijack substantially more legitimate concerns.

Nobody cares about how many times Lieberman voted with the Democrats, but rather which votes and what he stands for. I like how the Republicans are trying to tell the Democrats who they should have represent themselves. That's not going to fly. The majority of Americans and the vast majority of Democrats are against the war, and virtually everyone thinks it's an extremely important issue. Do you really expect people to ignore that in favor of counting meaningless procedural votes?

If providing a place for people to anonymously post whatever they want is illegal, than so is Salon letters and something on the order of most websites.

The bare pie looks pre-pubescent, and that is NOT a turn on to me, at all.

I would hate to think that we are becoming so entrenched in this 2-party system that people are upset, no, absolutely up in arms, when someone dares to run outside that system.

Many of us believe that somebody running outside the system gave Bush the white house in the first place. That was enough of a tragedy to rile people up, yes. The reality is that our election systems simply don't work very well with more than two candidates. (In the case of the presidency, it doesn't even work very well at all, but that's another issue. Seriously, why do we even call it a Democracy when the winner had less people vote for him than the loser?)

I find it interesting that people bring up filters now, as if they're something new. It would be far more accurate to say that now it's possible to go around the filters, whereas before it was extremely difficult to essentially impossible. The filters, however, have always been here. At best, you could argue that there's more of them - and some of them are going to disagree with you. The horror.

I'm going to have some difficulty finding much to celebrate in the primary defeat of a pro-choice, pro-stem cell candidate by an anti-choice, anti-science candidate. Maybe the new guy is extreme enough a Democrat can beat him in the election, though; remember that article about using stem cells as a wedge? Well, here's a textbook target...

I'm interested in finding out the means by which this plot was detected. Odds are, it was old fashioned detective work, not warrantless surveillance or torture.

I just want to say, in contrast to others, that I very much enjoy Glenn Greenwald's posts, not just despite their length but in many respects because of their depth.

The left-wing is accused of thinking that terrorism will end if we coddle terrorists. This is, of course, propaganda; the left-wing is not interested in coddling terrorists. Instead, it recommends acting in a consistent, moral manner such that we are above reproach; the idea being that fewer people will flock to the banners of our enemies if we really are the good guys rather than just the better killers.

The right-wing has a delusion of its own, which is that by killing innocents and beating our chests we will dissuade the terrorists. I doubt that even exterminating the Arab gene pool would accomplish this goal; we'd be attacked as the Nazis of our time. Putting the fear of death into suicide bombers is rather silly on the face of it. Similarly, aside from the Taliban, state sponsors of terrorism are over-stated. (Certainly Iraq wasn't.) The plots under discussion are home-grown.

The right has been trying to say that this is a "war". War is a pretty loose term; in some senses it's true, and in others it's not. They've gone on to say that you cannot fight a war with law enforcement - which is true. This statement, however, has a fatal flaw: it defines what is meant by war well enought to make terrorism no longer fit. If you cannot fight a war with law enforcement, than you also cannot solve a law-enforcement problem through war.

Terrorism is primarily a law-enforcement problem and can only be addressed as such. Other tactics have failed and will continue to fail, like trying to scoop water with a knife.

ANY boy who puts roofies into someone's drink should be reviled and despised by all his friends. Is he? No, they pat him on the back and say 'good one.'

That's absurd, and frankly more than a little sexist on your part. For your information, the vast, vast majority of men have no tolerance whatsoever for rapists.