Profiling the Fox viewer: A columnist at the traditionally conservative Canadian daily The Globe and Mail recently opined that bringing the Fox News Channel to Canada was a great idea, if only because then Canadians could be amused by American rhetoric. Bill O'Reilly railed against the article, calling Canadians "pinheads" and inaccurately dubbing the paper "the far-left Toronto Globe and Mail." O'Reilly's lathered groupies wrote venomous letters to the paper, offering an interesting cross-section of the networks fans. Writes John Doyle:

The people who support Fox News must be the most uncivil and foul-mouthed creatures on the planet. This is an informed opinion. They'd give English soccer hooligans a run for their money.

I lost count of the number of times I was called "an a**hole." It was at least 43 times, anyway. I was called "a pussy," "a wussy," "a pr**k," "a jerk," "a hack" and "a creep." A man in Cleveland not only called me "an a**hole" but also wished me a "f***ed-up day." A lady -- and I use the term advisedly -- in Colorado wrote to say that all Canadians are "a**holes" and thenordered me not to visit her state. I was also called a Canadian numerous times, as if that were an automatic and withering insult.

In an nice touch, a man from somewhere-in-the-USA opened by cheerfully calling me "sonny bub" and, after some confusing name-calling that involved the word "intellectual," he rose to a great rhetorical flourish -- he asked if I had served in Vietnam!

Bringing home the dead: A cargo worker in Kuwait secretly photographed flag-draped military coffins--"transfer tubes"--coming home from Iraq. After one of the images ran on the front page of the Seattle Times, in defiance of the Bush administration's ban on such photos, the woman was fired. The Memory Hole received the entire 361-photo collection after filing a Freedom of Information Request (mirrored here). The US death toll in Iraq now stands at 706. And: An excerpt from Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others,, her book on war photography, spectatorship, and the rhetoric of brutal images of suffering.