Forget fixing the health care system. Forget single payer. Forget Canada.

Let's just shoot people in the head when they get too sick.

I see lots of brilliant people writing here who could help put this program into practice.

We don't want sick people dragging our whole society down.

Look how needy they are.

The logic that applies to the family can just as well be applied to the entire nation.

So let's set some firm boundaries and start buying bullets and give ourselves the lives we all deserve.

Oy vey look at the rate these articles are coming now. How much more is there left to say? There's a lot of space left to fill between now and the election. Is there going to be an article like this every week? Or maybe twice a week?

It's too much. Salon is for the truly hardcore political junkies now.

Not my drug, sorry.

You can't keep a good Tibetan down.

What if research established that having an abortion was actually good for a woman's mental health? In a substantial, measurable way? The lifers would like to eat that bit of crow, I'm sure.

When research shows something the politicians don't like, the politicians lie.

I'm experienced here. Clinton ordered a major scientific review of medical marijuana in 1997, so that science could "settle" the issue. It was completed in 1999 and it concluded that there do exist people who will definitely die if they don't have access to marijuana.

That scientific report made a big impact on the drug policy platforms in the 2000 election, right?

No -- Bush never mentioned it while mumbling vague and misleading sentiments about state's rights, while Gore told everyone during his campaign that a panel of scientists who studied the problem "exhaustively" found "absolutely no evidence" for the claimed benefits.

I realize Gore supporters don't appreciate my bringing this up all the time.

But I want people to realize just how quickly and easily these dreams that science will "settle" some issue can be murdered by political reality.

People had dreams. When the study comes out, everything will change. That was the big dream!!!!

Well, it's been eight years since that study came out and I can count about 100 California medical marijuana providers right now who are under arrest and awaiting prosecution so they can be convicted and sentenced to ten years in federal prison.

So think about those people when you're dreaming about how science is going to "settle" the issue of abortion's impact on a woman's mental health.

Perhaps pro-choice activists should start learning the rules for writing to people in prison.

I had the pleasure to meet a lot of famous Soviet scientists. One of them told me about how his rabbi father was arrested for being a rabbi and sent to the Gulag when the scientist was a little boy. The father was never seen or heard from again.

People are not cured of the basic human capacity for cruelty and injustice by their abandonment of religion. They just find themselves a new religion that they don't call a religion, they call it something else like politics or something.

If they're cruel and controlling people, then their new non-religion is every bit as cruel and controlling as the religion they've abandoned.

That's the way it seems to work, from looking at history, from looking at how atheists have treated people when atheists have achieved political power.

(Dara has worked at Snapper's Sea Grill, a local restaurant that doesn't offer health insurance, since she gave up her country club job.)

If she hadn't given up her country club job, someone else would have taken the restaurant job, so someone else would be working in a job with no health insurance instead of Dara.

And if that person had children... then what?

Then she or he would be to blame for taking that job too, I suppose.

It was better back in the old days when the conservatives at least tried to use logic.

Does this behavior ring any bells? Does anyone recall a certain Houston-based energy company that dabbled in derivatives trading and tried to make its books look good by moving dodgy operations into off-balance sheet special entities whose true nature was hidden from the outside world?

Oh hell yeah. I heard the bell ring two paragraphs ago.

I think I'll go watch a horror movie now to calm down.

Literary journalism is bad enough but literary advice columns -- I have to vote no, sorry. Too many compromises to truth and common sense have to be made to support the flow of the prose.

For example, is anyone going to ask one of these marvelous sentient oak tress if they WANT to bear the weight and nails of a tree house so they can babysit the LW's kid with ADD?

Oak trees look really solid and strong, but I have a few on my property and I can tell you those huge branches they carry are extremely heavy, so heavy that sometimes the tree can't even support them and people have to hire tree companies to build steel and cable supports so the giant branches don't fall off and squash people and their carports and their garages.

In my city, the city council is extremely protective towards our native oak population. So I'm not even sure it would be legal to build a treehouse in one.

I've read about that research that claims outdoors exercise somewhere green makes people more able to focus on their work.

I believe that because I see how physicists like to hold their summer workshops in very green and mountainous locations so they can go on long hikes on their days off.

But I've never heard of any of them building tree houses in their back yards to accomplish this focus-enhancing effect.

Maybe the family should move to someplace with a bigger house, where they can take the kids for long hikes somewhere green and mountainous on their days off?