As far as one-person political protests go, Cindy Sheehan’s is pretty damn effective. She really leaves Bush (who is a political master) with his hands tied. The best thing he can do, politically speaking, is to walk out to the street and give Sheehan a hug. But that is impossible. If he does that, he’ll have a line of protesters for every topic out there waiting in line.

But ultimately, the Sheehan protest tells us more about ourselves than it does about the principle characters involved.

First, we see the intense contempt and hate that is thrown across the aisle by extremists and pundits on both sides. Just pathetic. I could quote folks here, but why, you know this song by now.

Second, we’ve seen how the Sheehan story has pushed Iraq back into the headlines and stirred up unanswered questions. But you have to wonder, how can we be in a war and not have really been that focused on it during the pre-Sheehan months?

Quick, name the top issues being debated when it comes to the Iraqi Constitution…

We’ve grown bored with what is supposedly the struggle of an era.

But we ain’t too bored to blast away at Cindy Sheehan.

I once asked a relatively well-known French chef who was cooking a dinner for 12 in my kitchen why his vegetables tasted and looked so much better than mine ever did.

I was sort of expecting to hear a thick French accent explaining that such secrets couldn’t possibly be shared with a culinary civilian such as me.

But instead, the chef paused, picked up a knife, sliced off half a cube of butter and dropped it into a deep pot of steaming vegetables.

While I rarely employ that technique at home, we all sort of know that butter and fat is what makes stuff taste so good when we’re eating out. And while we may love to hear stories of fast food chains who are being pressured to offer lighter and healthier fare, the truth is that, as long as someone else is doing the slicing and dropping, we’re pretty cool with the just add butter strategy.

All this helps explain why restaurants that adopt a lighter menu often retreat to their old ways. The words of praise can only do so much. They need your mouth for another calling. And it turns out that we tend to talk out of one side of our mouth and eat out of the other.

Over the past day or so I’ve been collecting email addresses from those folks who have expressed interest in being part of a beta test for a new site I am about to launch.

So let’s take a look at the latest webmail and AOL numbers.

Here is a breakdown of email address percentages from the first thousand or so sign-ups (with the caveat that a large number of these addresses belong to designers, web developers and other early adopters).

4.5% of the addresses are from AOL.

7% of the addresses are from Hotmail.

15% of the addresses are from Yahoo.

25% of addresses are from Gmail.

It’s pretty amazing how quicky Gmail has become the webmail of choice for the cool kids.

And it’s equally amazing that so many people still can’t seem to shake AOL.

These numbers are ultimately all about page views for more ad words. So the Gmail lead is not insignificant.

Again, these numbers are all about early adopters (narrowed to those who have the good taste to want to beta test my new site), but they are worth noting. If Gmail could approach this kind of a breakdown in the mainstream, it would have a big impact on all involved.

Some people look at an extended olive branch and see kindling.

And so it is with the disgustingly predictable Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal who greeted the Gaza pullout with the following:

The resistance is capable of ending the Israeli occupation and achieving all our rights. The armed struggle is the only strategy that Hamas possesses.

Neither the liberation of the Gaza Strip, nor the liberation of the West Bank or even Jerusalem will suffice us. Hamas will pursue the armed struggle until the liberation of all our lands. We don’t recognize the state of Israel or its right to hold onto one inch of Palestine. Palestine is an Islamic land belonging to all the Muslims

It makes perfect sense.

Mashaal is in the the violence business. Peace renders him and his obsolete.

The key at historical moments like these is that someone on the Palestinian side yells louder than he does.

Meanwhile, the Israelis must also deal with their own extremists. A gunman killed four Palestinians in the West Bank on Wednesday.

Sharon yelled pretty loudly denouncing the act as “an act of Jewish terror against innocent Palestinians out of twisted thinking, aimed at stopping the disengagement.”

There has always been a third side in this conflict. The side that doesn’t want peace. They will not go away easily. The question is how much impact their words and deeds have on those who know that peace is the only reasonable path.

It is my pleasure to invite you to beta test a remarkable, exciting, wonderful and downright neato new site called Rollyo.

It’s my own site, built with the help of an absolutely incredible team of designers, engineers and information architects.

A very private beta test will begin early next week. We only have room for a small number of people in this first phase.

If you’d like to join in the fun, please sign up here…

To understand the dynamics of the Gaza pullout, one needs to keep a few basic numbers in mind:

There are about 1.4 million Palestinians living in Gaza

Nearly half of them are under 15 years old

The birthrate among Palestinians in Gaza is about 6 children per woman

Unemployment: 60%

There are about 8,000 Israeli settlers who had made the Gaza strip their home.