Today's complaints about Hispanic immigrants (whether illegal or legal) seem awfully similar to past complaints about Southern European and Irish immigrants. There's a nativist streak in this nation that demagogues have historically exploited. Get people riled up enough about immigration and they will be distracted from the terrible job our country's leaders are doing. Get people frightened enough about immigration and they will tend to fall into line behind authoritarian leaders.

High rates of illegal immigration are a sign that our legal immigration system is broken. People come to the United States illegally because the mechanism for immigrating legally isn't working. Increasing the number of temporary work visas and streamlining procedures -- coupled with border enforcement and penalties for employers -- would do a lot to resolve the problem.

Another issue is lack of economic opportunity in Mexico and many of the countries in Central America. Surely there is more that the United States can be doing to encourage economic development in this area! The United States and Mexico have one of the world's largest income differentials across a shared border. People with local opportunities to work and earn money are less likely to pour across our borders.

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

Talk about cognitive dissonance!

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.