Like women who will contract deadly forms of cancer because they didn't have access to screening tests.

The real goal of these people is to impose their authoritarian morality and rigid vision of family life on everyone else. To them, family life depends on parents (i.e., fathers) having absolute control over their children and children showing total obedience to their parents. Allowing pregnant teenaged girls to seek prenatal care independently of their parents therefore subverts the very basis of proper family life. It's irrelevant that teens in abusive or neglectful family situations may not have a good enough relationship with their parents to even broach the subject. Preserving parental authority is more important than anything else and a daughter's duty of obedience to her parents (however bad their behavior is) trumps her personal safety and wellbeing.

Denying prenatal care to teens also fits in with the authoritarian moralist's view of pregnancy as God's punishment to girls for having premarital sex. To them, pregnant teenaged girls are nothing more than sex-crazed sluts who shouldn't be coddled by receiving medical care. Their grandmothers (who were far more deserving, moral and pure than the dirty, immoral, degenerate girls of today) didn't have the luxury of prenatal care, so why should they?

You're as predictable as clockwork.

If you had actually read my post, you would have realized that I was referring to beliefs about pregnant teenaged girls that spring from an authoritarian, patriarchal moral system, not to fathers in general.

But don't let that stand in the way of a good rant.

Subpoena the RNC's ISP and get their backups. I'm sure they have plenty of interesting emails that Karl Rove imagined that he'd deleted off his Blackberry.

Bush wants to look like he's addressing this problem without actually having to do anything to fix it. So he's going to set up a bunch of commissions and inquiry panels to "look into" the problem. All they'll do is chew up time and produce binders full of contradictory, useless findings. But Bush will use them to bolster the claim that he supports the troops.

Meanwhile, wounded soldiers will still be getting lousy care in inadequate facilities. And Bush will continue to not give a damn.

Her novels speak for themselves. It's irrelevant what she looked like.

It's not a bad idea to raise kids' awareness of issues surrounding ownership, privilege and so forth. As any parent knows, young children have a pretty well-developed sense of fairness -- especially when applied to themselves! What I think is raising people's hackles is the earnest yet pretentious academic language of the article and how it plays into conservative canards about liberalism. Even die-hard liberals tend to cringe while reading stuff like this.

The underlying problem isn't the teachers' politics, though. It's that they let Lego play time get out of hand. As a parent, I'd be concerned because it indicates that they don't have good control of their class. My kids played with Legos, Lincoln Logs and other building toys in preschool and early elementary school, too. But their teachers made them clean everything up at the end of play time and never let them set up semi-permanent Lego towns. This prevented kids from hoarding blocks indefinitely (like the kids in the Seattle school did) because everyone started fresh each time. Rule violations were handled promptly and not allowed to continue until the class was in an uproar. This made for a much more equitable play environment than all of the touchy-feely stuff that the Seattle school teachers put their students through.

Sounds like you're dating Miles Vorkosigan, or perhaps his pudgy cloned brother Mark.

Either way, your hormones and heart have to be into it. If troll man turns you on and rocks your world, stay with him. Don't listen to that little insecure voice inside your head and don't worry about what other people may say or think.

But if the sexual chemistry isn't there and if you look inside your heart and realize that he's just a passing item, then break up with him.

I like the idea of giving the paintings to your siblings and your mother's old friends. Definitely keep a couple that have special meaning for you and your daughter, too.

What about doing a gallery showing before you give the paintings away or put them into storage? This would be a great way to remember your mom and honor her memory. Find a small, non-pretentious gallery in your area and see if the owner is amenable to doing a one-woman retrospective. Take all of the paintings down from your apartment and hang them in the gallery, along with a few photos of your mother (especially if you have some of her in action at the easel). Invite your family and your mom's friends to the opening. Everyone can tell their favorite stories about your mother, drink inexpensive wine, and eat cheese and crackers. It would be a combination memorial service and reunion. When the show is done, everyone you've given a painting to can pick it up from the gallery.

Many subprime lenders made extravagant claims to entice people with low incomes and poor credit histories to take on unaffordable mortgage debt, then made buckets of money off them. The unrealistic promises, fine-print "gotchas," hidden fees, and generally lousy terms that these lenders offered to their customers are classic examples of predatory lending practices.

Now, though, the bubble has burst and these lenders are being hoisted on their own petards. What better way to deflect attention from their own exploitation of the poor and desperate than to blame their critics of the very same thing?

... why did she work for the Bush administration?

Talk about cognitive dissonance!