The NYT piece on Iran is penned by Michael Gordon, this Michael Gordon. Why does he still have a job there? Does the paper want to make the same mistakes again and again?

I flew from Prague to Edinburgh late last night, and it was an interesting and slightly eerie scene. Lots of police presence with machine guns, no vehicles of any kind on the inner forecourt, traffic to the airport backed way up.

And on the flight, I read this interesting Jonathan Raban piece on Seattle.

Anyone have a theory regarding Mike Hargrove?

How did Paris Hilton get into the Blood Feast video?

I wonder what feasting on blood has to do with Egypt...

@ Jonathan~
Trying to spark meaningful debate?
Making an intellectually stimulating point?
Trying to solve any problems?

Or just bitching like a little kid? Get over it and don't write anything unless you actually have something to say.

@8 Don't you realize that Dan is personally responsible for the war in Iraq?

Sorry to feed the you-know-what.

Sharon Hargrove says: "He's slept in his own bed four days in eight months..."

Apparently Mike wasn't home very much this past off-season. Sounds like marital issues.

@9 Did you hear? He's also single handedly destroying the gay civil rights movement from the inside out by going to bars. Dan Savage is truly capable of wonders.

just goes to show that nightclub owners aren't doing enough to protect the police from hostile crowds outside their clubs.

That Jonathan guy is annoying, but he does have a point. Dan Savage continues to beat the same drum about less-than-human Muslims taking over the world, and he continues to hire dumbass bigot Bruce Bawer.

@12 Good shot.

Jonah, Jonathan, Jamier.

It's not possible that these are all the same poster. No one could be that crafty, that DIABOLICAL!

Gore's Godfather? As if his father, the mean old man who voted against civil-rights legislation of 1964 & 1965, wasn't bad enough ...

I wish more horror movies had a persistent funeral dirge going on.

I'm not the same person as anyone. Isn't it reasonable that when The Stranger posts a story about the "drums of war," we point out that those drums are still being beaten loudly by the editor of this newspaper, mostly through the choices of the people he hires to write?

Quoting Bruce Bawer in last week's letters section:

As Muslims gain numbers and power in Europe, conditions for gays are palpably worsening. Two years ago the leading Dutch gay-rights group admitted that Muslim-perpetrated gay-bashing had changed Amsterdam's once-free atmosphere: "Gays and lesbians are less willing to walk hand-in-hand because they might be beaten up." This is a growing crisis across Europe.

Really? How about the many, many, many, many more Muslim-bashings in Amsterdam and across Europe? Do 174 registered anti-Muslim hate crimes in the Netherlands in one month not count? Many Dutch Muslims are immigrants just like Bawer, but for some reason he thinks only the few attacks that affect his sub-group are a "growing crisis." I wonder if Bawer's pasty white skin has anything to do with that? Did he think he was writing for (white) pride week?

This just in: Bush commutes Libby's prison term. Fucking prick.

@20,

I have issues with Bawer as well. However, he has built a career on taking down all religious extremists. He started with Christian fundamentalists here. He then got fed up with being deprived his rights in the U.S. and immigrated to Norway. Considering those factors, I can't completely blame him for being dismayed over increasing Muslim immigration to Europe.

The problem with Bawer is that he refuses to see any shades of gray. Of course, many of his current detractors didn't have a problem with it when he was lambasting Christianity. It's possible that racism is fueling his overreaction to homophobia in Islam, but I think it's far more likely that it's the result of his fear and loathing of all religion, particularly anything that reeks of fundamentalism.