"... Freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do."

And this is the guy the wing nuts want to be President. But hey, freedom isn't about, well, freedom -- it's about submission to authority to enable it to stick it to people you don't like.

Spay/neuter laws are not a bad idea in general, though. Shelters are full of unwanted dogs of all breeds, not just pit bulls.

At a recent family gathering, we counted up relatives with bionic parts. There's my dad with a bionic heart assistance device (pacemaker-defibrillator), my diabetic cousin with a bionic pancreas (insulin pump), my deaf cousin with bionic ears (cochlear implants), and a number of folks with bionic hips and knees, not to mention a breast cancer survivor with a bionic boob! Eventually we will all be like the Six Million Dollar Man as our body parts fail and are replaced with machines. So it's heartening to hear that DARPA is sponsoring development of prosthetic limbs that behave more like natural ones. This technology will spill over into the civilian sector and if it won't make us better, stronger, and faster than we were, at least it might make us almost as good.

His lips move.

I know three women who got pregnant while deliberately taking a break from infertility treatments. Perhaps they were sensitive to stress and taking a break from worrying about their infertility lowered their stress levels enough to let them conceive. Or maybe it was just random chance that their ovaries fired that month. It's impossible to know.

I hope the stress theory won't fuel yet another round of infertility victim-blaming. ("It's your own fault that you're infertile because you let yourself get too stressed out!") Infertility in and of itself is extremely stressful. And telling someone not to stress out about it is the surest way to make them more stressed!

Researchers should be studying the physiological changes that stress makes in women's bodies in general and our reproductive system in particular, with an eye towards countering these changes. In the meantime, it might not be a bad idea for infertility specialists to encourage their patients to practice known, safe techniques for reducing stress, like meditation, exercise, and other lifestyle changes.

This sort of female entrepreneurship has been going on for ages. Since childhood, I've known many housewives who ran side businesses out of their homes -- Mary Kay cosmetics, catering, cleaning, sewing, party planning, decorating, you name it. And don't forget those Tupperware and candle parties! Professional women, too. A good friend who's a freelance technical/marketing/business writer was forced to become a "mompreneur" back in the '60s. She'd had a baby and wanted to keep her job, but was forced to quit. So she worked out of her home, built up a list of clients, and is now one of the most successful independent consultants in my area.

Plenty of women over the years have followed similar paths. They may have needed income but could not hold down a full-time job because of family responsibilities, a desire to spend more time with their kids, or various other reasons. They may have been fired, harassed, or passed over for promotion because they were women. Or they may have realized that the corporate rat race was, well, for the rodents. So they struck out on their own. To imagine that this is some kind of new, 21st century phenomenon shows the US News writer's total lack of any sort of context. (One of the reasons why we always called it "Useless News," by the way!)

The United States went through similar scandals with tainted food, medicine and consumer products starting, oh, a little over a hundred years ago. Ditto dangerous working conditions. Companies were always seeking to produce at the lowest cost, regardless of the consequences, and could not be trusted to police themselves and provide safe products. So the government was forced to step in and regulated industry in order to protect the health and safety of ordinary Americans. Same thing goes for pollution starting about 50 years ago or so. With public trust restored, consumers and producers went on their merry way.

However, the Chinese and the Republicans clearly learned nothing from this era. The Republicans followed Karl Rove's stated desire to return to the McKinley era, where lack of regulation meant poisoned food, water, air, workplaces and products for ordinary people but immense profits for the wealthy elite. Same goes for the Chinese, who are merrily trashing their country and its people in their own Gilded Age.

So all of you idiots who moan and groan about evil government regulations should be happy now. You got what you wanted. There are effectively no government regulations. The FDA and the Consumer Product Safety Commission are emasculated. The only thing keeping us from a wholesale repeat of the scandals of yesteryear is the desire of Mattel and its well-known cohorts to keep their reputations, but less well-known firms are not going to care and will continue producing toxic products.

The result? Poisoned and dead kids, poisoned and dead pets, and widespread panic as we all wait to find out which contaminated products will be recalled next.

I hope you're all happy now.

Ugly Betty and her working-class Hispanic family and neighbors are shown much more sympathetically than Betty's wealthy employers and snotty upper-class co-workers. Ugly Betty directly takes on the class divide, too, which most other shows won't touch with a ten-foot pole.

It's also worth noting that The Simpsons (dysfunctional lower middle-class family) is the longest running sitcom on network TV.