My husband and I have lived below our means ever since we got married a dozen years ago. When our friends and neighbors were out buying huge houses and unnecessary stuff to fill them, we were paying our credit card bill in full every month and knocking off extra on the principal of our 15-year mortgage. We did not contribute to the insane economy that was based on folks running up debt, so we will not be guilted into changing our thrifty habits now to save jobs that should not have been created in the first place. Sorry Starbucks barristas and day-spa eyebrow waxers, I didn't help you get that job you lost and won't spend a dime to help you get it back. Go to nursing school.

As with any other part of sensible personal financial management, pets have to be budgeted for. $20 a week set aside goes a long way to building an emergency fund for pet care. Most years we don't use all of that so it rolls over and pads the years when more critical care is needed. It's one less trip for fast food a week, or one less date night at the movies that gets shifted to Netflix instead. Once you get used to it, it's easy to do and makes a HUGE difference when it comes time to pay the vet bills.

You Polanski apologists who cannot sympathize with his victim had better hope or pray that your children, or you grandchildren, never have a reason to empathize with her.

I am a woman who spent a lot of time drunk in college. I spent a lot of time around other drunk women as well, when I was either drunk or sober. So while I certainly cannot speak for all women, I can say that I am pretty comfortable with the belief that being drunk does not make most women do things they don't really want to do. If their personality and behaviors change dramatically when drunk, I think the underlying needs and desires were there all along and being drunk is an excuse to let them out.

Take me, for instance. Sober, I am not into casual sex. I love to dance and sing and laugh at parties. Drunk, I dance sillier, sing louder and laugh longer, but I have never once had the urge to hook-up with someone I wouldn't have considered sober. Alcohol relaxes me, but has never made me do something I later thought was wrong. It has never taken over my free will. I have many friends who *have* hooked up drunk, and not a single one was someone who would not have done it had they been sober. Not a single one ever used alcohol as an explaination for what they had done. Not a single one felt she had done something out of character. And I really don't think my friends and I are out of the norm.

I really dislike the idea of blaming guys for "taking advantage" of drunken women - unless she is passed out, but I think we all agree on that. All the drunken women I know, including me, still know how to say "no" when they mean it. If they say "yes", then they mean that, too, and likely would sober. No Jekyll and Hyde here.

Add me to the folks who find no value from Wingnut's column. I have read each and have learned nothing that I haven't already heard from Fox News or Rush Limbaugh. Salon keeps asking me to renew my paid membership - for this? Seriously?

It made no difference to me sexually if my partners were circumcized or not - none of them was getting anywhere near me without a condom. The *one* man who ever refused to wear a condom used his intact status as his reason - he didn't want to bind his foreskin. I'm sure that worked on some folks, but not me. I don't know any intact men well enough to ask the question, but I wonder if condoms really do change sensation enough that it might discourage condom use in intact teenage boys? If so, than the STD issues really do become a serious concern.

So the only man I have ever had sex with sans condom is circumcized hubby, and he is very sensitive - to the point that we've discussed being happy he is not intact, because if that makes one even more sensitive he wouldn't last a minute.

"I mean, really, all snarking aside, why don't they think about the ramifications for their own well-being on this?"

I'm related to a bunch of these people, and they *know* they will be better off but refuse to admit it, because then they'd lose the basis for their neverending argument that the Dems can't do anything right. Acknowledging the sense of any plan from the left would be a slippery slope to considering that just *maybe* we're correct about other things, too. And since it is all or nothing with many of these Republicans, the left can never be even hinted at helping them, on any level. They really get their cake and can eat it, too - they'll get more economic stablity but also get to keep hating the left, loud and proud. The hypocrisy doesn't exist to them as long as they can keep denying it out loud.

I haven't read all the letters so forgive me if this has already been mentioned, but I saw Elizabeth Edwards on "The Daily Show" and she in no way used it "to get back at the tramp who seduced her husband." EE never even mentioned her, and Jon Stewart only danced around the subject of the affair at all. They mostly talked about the book in general. Please treat this classy lady with some respect and stop assigning her actions she never took.