In Florida, plastic bags are not a merely symbolic environmental issue, another way to possibly save petroleum and control our overflowing landfills.

Unlike California, we have sea turtles here. The turtles, an already critically endangered animal, eat plastic bags which are washed out to sea, mistaking them for jellyfish. The bags block their digestive processes and they die. These bags float in the Sargasso sea forever, never decaying. And their number continues to increase.

I realize sea turtles have no practical economic value in your drab entrepreneurial universe. But they are of great importance in mine, much more so than businessmen getting rich selling a minor convenience that needlessly consumes unrenewable resources and pollutes the environment. I see no reason an animal that has survived on earth for millions of years, enduring everything nature has thrown at it, should die because someone is making a buck selling little plastic bags and lobbying Republican legislators to make it possible for him to do so forever.

Of course, this conversation is not really about plastic bags. It isn't even about how we should make decisions about the bags. You actually make valid points on both of those questions.

The real issue is how you seize on these trivia and obsess about them because you see them as evidence of the venality and evil of "my side", while you blithely ignore the obscenities and horrors coming from the Conservative universe.

Reflect again for a while on the vaginal ultrasound rape artwork in my "You are right on both counts" post, above. Physician, heal thyself.

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

Matthew 7:3