Every once in a while a little piece of satire finds its way into the newspaper and becomes a runaway hit with our readers who comment. That is the situation this morning with Dana Milbank's Washington Sketch, in which he suggests that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential prospects are as dead as that Norwegian blue parrot in the famous Monty Python bit.

The occasion, of course, was Clinton's victory last night in West Virginia's Democratic primary. This was a resounding triumph the pollsters had predicted and that almost every political prognosticator called totally irrelevant because of the assumption that Sen Barack Obama has already locked up the nomination.

Most of those who comment on the sketch are either amused or furious, although there are the usual other conversations -- some of them relevant -- that follow most political stories. The Post (known as WaPo) is accused, of course, of being firmly in the Obama camp. How else could the existence of this outrage be explained? Others cheered its humor.

Some insisted on sticking to substance, pointing to the fact that exit polls in West Virginia underlined the race issue. As Dan Balz reported in the main story, "about half of West Virginia voters said they think Obama shares at least some" of the views of the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., Obama's former pastor. Those voters went for Clinton about 7 to 1.

On Sunday the Post launched a four-part investigative series that effectively if not intentionally combines two hot-button political issues: immigration and the state of health care. Either subject always generates strong views in the comments from our readers. Combined, they raise the usual immigration-related arguments pitting nativist sentiment about illegality against those looking for solutions and join that debate with questions on why we should be worried about detained immigrants not getting decent health care when it is difficult for many Americans to do so.

Reporters Dana Priest and Amy Goldstein tell the "story of life, death and often shabby medical care within an unseen network of special prisons for foreign detainees across the country" and say that "the medical neglect they endure is part of the hidden human cost of increasingly strict policies in the post-Sept. 11 United States and a lack of preparation for the impact of those policies..."

In the first two days they tell us specific stories about real people who are (or were) in detention, a population that does not get a lot of sympathy in the best of times. There is anger and bile in the comments and a several who write are unhappy about what they see as agenda journalism. Others express genuine sympathy and concern for the real people involved.

The MSM this morning are all over Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's insistence on continuing her pursuit of the Democratic presidential nomination despite Sen. Barack Obama's victory in North Carolina and stronger showing than (some) expected in Indiana.

Our Readers Who Comment have also expressed special interest (or disgust) with a story that asked if conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh's "Operation Chaos" -- in which he urged Republicans to vote for Clinton in the Democratic primary -- actually held down Obama's totals. Limbaugh called off the operation yesterday, Alec MacGillis and Peter Slevin report, saying he wants Obama to be the party's pick, because "I now believe he would be the weakest of the Democrat nominees."

Limbaugh is a polarizing figure and has supporters in the comment string today, but most of those who bothered to write are not fans; many remind us that Limbaugh has had drug abuse problems, and several wonder if my colleagues at WaPo have lost their way in even bothering with the story, which I really liked.

We all know this morning that Sen. Barack Obama won North Carolina big and came awfully close to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in Indiana. Our Readers Who Comment are talking about an article by Perry Bacon Jr. and Anne E. Kornblut which says that Clinton's aides concede "it would be difficult for her to catch Sen. Barack Obama in either delegates or overall votes" in the seemingly never-to-end struggle for the Democratic presidential nomination.

There is unusual near unanimity among our readers. Many of them seem to want Clinton to concede and go home. There is considerable discussion about what would happen the Florida and Michigan primary results could be counted; there is the debate about whether Obama is electable, and there is an extended conversation about one paragraph in story, which said, "A Clinton adviser said the situation was increasingly becoming one in which 'she cannot be nominated and he can't get elected.' "

With Democratic primaries coming up tomorrow in North Carolina and Indiana, candidates Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama are on different pages in response to Republican John McCain's original proposal to halt the federal gasoline tax for a little while. Clinton is arguing that short-term relief will help the little guy; Obama is arguing the more complicated position of most economists that if gasoline taxes go away, people will drive more and prices will rise because of supply and demand and savings will be minimal. Our Readers Who Comment, for the most part, are ignoring the underlying economic arguments and simply cheering for their favorite candidate or deriding the other.

As By Perry Bacon Jr. and Shailagh Murray write today, "both candidates are betting that their rhetoric on the economy -- Obama insisting voters will reject easy answers, Clinton with her proposals for short-term relief -- will give them an edge Tuesday."

The federal gasoline tax supports a road-building program created in the administration of Dwight Eisenhower (a Republican) to bring us the Interstate Highway System. It and a transit-related subset are funded by a tax that has been increased during the administrations of presidents named Reagan (a Republican), George H.W. Bush (a Republican) and Clinton (a Democrat). The roads built by the tax have made it possible for us to live a long way from where we work and use a lot of gasoline. Our readers are ignoring this history too.

This morning we have something unusual. Most of our Readers Who Comment are in general agreement on a topic. The occasion for this near unity is a wonderful story by Ann Scott Tyson about Pfc. Monica Brown, an Army medic who was awarded a Silver Star for doing her job under intense fire in Afghanistan but who was then pulled from her unit because an Army policy says she shouldn't have been in that situation because she is a woman.

Most of our RWC find rules like this a little silly in the world we live in today. They point out, as does reporter Tyson, that modern warfare does not feature fixed lines of battle or predictable situations where one is more likely to be at risk. The old arguments that the presence of a woman disrupts the clear thinking of men appears in a few comments, but I did not see the term "weaker sex" anywhere, although it will probably appear before the day is over. And, to be sure, there are those who think war is a man's job only.

There are complaints about war in general and a reprise on the question of whether the U.S. should have cut back in Afghanistan to invade Iraq. But by far the majority of the comments simply salute a brave woman who did her job in enormously dangerous circumstances.

Peter Slevin and Darryl Fears provide a thoughtful summary of the Sen. Barack Obama - Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. controversy today. As they wrote, Obama attempted to distance himself further from his former longtime pastor, calling Wright's comments about the United States "outrageous" and "destructive."

Our Readers Who Comment are all over the map in their reaction to a situation that has become an important factor (at least this week) in the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination. Readers suggest that Obama should have known and strongly rejected Wright's world views long ago; that Obama took offense not to Wright's views but to Wright's suggestion that Obama was saying what a politician has to say; that this is or is not about racism; that somehow the Clintons are involved, and that the media are covering a nonissue instead of substantive stuff like Iraq, health care or the price of gasoline. I find it impossible to support suggestions that journalism should be ignoring this one.

The one topic that has consistently drawn more heated debate than the war in Iraq is illegal immigration, and our Readers Who Comment are at it again today. The discussion is about a report that hundreds of foreign-born families have pulled their children from Prince William County public schools and enrolled them in nearby Fairfax County, Arlington County and Alexandria. Amy Gardner tells us that this comes after Prince William began implementing rules to deny some services to illegal immigrants and require police to check the immigration status of crime suspects thought to be in the country illegally.

Opponents of the rules say even legal immigrants have left the county, fearing the climate there; supporters say the rules have done what they were supposed to do.

So far, officials tell Gardner, Fairfax and Arlington counties can absorb the influx; Prince William County officials say they will save $6 million in school costs as a result. But the longer-term picture is unclear. And as a Post editorial points out this morning, Prince William County has been slashing the high price of enforcing the new rules, which are expected to cost $26 million over the next five years.

This is playing out here and elsewhere because the federal government has punted on how to manage the illegal immigration issue, a federal problem impacting states and localities. The arguments in the comment string this morning reflect both compassion for the families affected and the bitterness many have that the battle over immigration even exists.

Dana Milbank, whose Washington Sketch column often sparks debate among our Readers Who Comment, touched off a storm this morning. He said that the family of Lt. Col. Billy Hall, recently killed in Iraq and leaving two young children fatherless, granted permission for the media to cover Hall's burial in Arlington Cemetery. "But the military had other ideas," Milbank wrote, "and they arranged the Marine's burial yesterday so that no sound, and few images, would make it into the public domain."

Milbank writes that his column may be dismissed as "media whining," but says "the de facto ban on media at Arlington funerals fits neatly with an effort by the administration to sanitize the war in Iraq. That, in turn, has contributed to a public boredom with the war," which has claimed more than 4,000 American lives and countless thousands of Iraqi ones.

Many of our readers agree with Milbank and see no reason why the Arlington officials can override family wishes. Several others -- who have apparently experienced what they regard (sometimes correctly, I must say) as media transgressions in exploiting the emotional side of human suffering -- say they wouldn't let cameras or reporters anywhere near such a personal event.

Others want more facts. Several suggested Milbank's treatise lacks a significant element: reporting. They want to know the names of the Arlington officials who kept the cameras at bay and reporters so far away from the service that they could not hear the words of the chaplain. Many blame the media for permitting the Iraq War to happen in the first place; others recall the impact of media coverage on the Vietnam war and suggest that the military has learned to keep the cameras and reporters away. All this while Iraq has fallen far below the economy on the list of things that worry Americans.

In case you missed it, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton won the Democratic primary in Pennsylvania last night by about 10 percentage points over Sen. Barack Obama. Dan Balz, the Post's senior political writer, says the victory threw the Clinton candidacy a lifeline, but that her path to the nomination remains "extraordinarily treacherous."

Not all our Readers Who Comment agree with Dan. In fact, they're all over the map in morning-after comment writing. Some see the results as bad for Obama. Some see them as the death of Clinton even if she doesn't know it. Some look at the exit polls and conclude that only Clinton can defeat presumed Republican nominee Sen. John McCain. Some just wish this noise would stop. It's only two weeks to the Indiana primary, the next biggie, and it's only going to get louder.