The core of the argument against Caroline Kennedy is that she has no political experience and that she's capitalizing in her family name. So?

Men capitalize on their famous names all the time. Two of California's governors, Reagan and Schwartenegger, would have run and won in whichever state they chose because people knew them. Recognition is a huge part of the PR battle for politicians.

Nepotism exists everywhere, not just in politics. Corporations - law firms, consumer products firms, civil servants, news organizations - hire relatives all the time. Sometimes the hires are good workers, other times not.

The argument can't be parsed in terms of connections, because that's just another term for networking. Some people have more, better connections than others; that's just the way it is. Besides, there are no job qualifications for public office.

While certain skills would be useful, so are connections and willingness to do the job at hand, there's no list of specific skills required in order to run for or hold public office. Any of us can run. We have to do certain things - get money, make contacts and plan - but any one of us could start by being a school board member or community organizer.

If Caroline Kennedy can walk into any law office and get a job, then she can walk into the Capitol and take a seat in the Senate. That said, she should, just as a matter of sensible positioning, offer her opinions on issues. Having candidates who speak honestly about their positions rather than on what focus groups say will win is the change we need to foster.

The stated reason people send their children to religious schools is because the schools provide religious and moral instruction. The stance underpinning this is that parents, as the largest influence on children, must be given the choice of schooling apart from established and inadequate public schools. The contradiction in that if parents are the biggest influence, then why are schools said to be doing the work of moral instruction?

On the ground looking up to the lofty, wobbly moral pedestal these parents sit upon, I must ask why civil rights laws don't apply to private institutions. Other laws do. You can't murder or abuse children, even if it's in your code of ethics to allow it, so how is it legal to treat people badly, to discriminate on the basis of unsound religious fervor? These schools are accredited by the state, so perhaps the state should consider not accrediting those schools that disguise abuse as personal values.

Children learn to navigate the world from within the world of their families. A child is a public school is no less or more moral or religious than one who attends a religious or private school. After all, Bush, Cheney and many of the torturers went to private and/or religious schools.

Adults control school lesson plans so they are accountable for what is taught. Having a peculiarly inept understanding of Christianity and the Bible should mark the adults in this and many other private schools as incompetent. Then we can create education standards so all our children can receive a complete and genuinely useful, constructive education.

Getting to the relatively recently remodeled SFO means following yellow (Domestic terminal) or yellow-green (International terminal) signs. Except for the facts that there are two domestic airlines in the International terminal, the parking is miles away from the gates, there's no place to sit to wait for people coming in from other countries, and there's no easy way to get from one terminal to the other, it works really well. Not.

There are no clear or really, visible, signs inside the airport to get from one area to another. There is a one way looping tram that takes you away from where you want to go. However, a quick look at a map shows there's a short walkway from one to other. Unfortunately, none of the attendants at the almost always unmanned information kiosks can read a map.

I'm thinking clear, obvious signs, a UK Tube sort of map and flooring and signage that makes the destinations and the pathways clear would be most useful.

By all means, the TSA should be part of a solution, not a major problem.

Surely a law this broad, this intentionally vague would not stand up to legal scrutiny. Law works best when the laws are very specific, not when they are statements of (im)moral authority or religious belief.

The same mistake was made when the misnamed "partial birth abortion act" was written. That law jams irrelevant rules into medical procedure and puts lawmakers - who are woefully ignorant of medical knowledge as well as impossibly distant from the situation and circumstances - in the position of making blanket judgments about the health of people they don't know. It removes authority from the people best in a position to take action to ...well, to no one really.

The blurry concept of these mandates takes away any chance at holding anyone who makes the law responsible for the consequences of it. A doctor and a patient determine a course of treatment, but wait! there's this fuzzy legal notion that might apply, that might be applied by a zealous, anti-choice attorney general. Making personal choices of all sorts becomes risky when representatives of the State take to deciding what's possible for you to do or think.

Society just doesn't function when law, the mediator between ideals and the orderly application of them, strays into the realm of imposing dubious ideology and bad science on the citizenry.