Says Cary:

...What could it take to build a big building in the center of town and give everybody a bed who needs a place to sleep? What could it take to give everybody a good meal who is hungry? Keep it open 24 hours a day. Staff it with ministers, cooks and bouncers. Have drug and alcohol recovery meetings there. Put all the soup kitchens there. Put all the cots there. Put the mayor's office there. Put all the deacons and elders and mullahs and bishops and rabbis there. Put all the columnists and communists and free-marketeers and Christian fundamentalists there. Put everybody there who pretends to give a shit. Put me there. Put us all there. Give us showers and hot soup. Keep us there until we make it work. Do the same thing in every city and town. How hard could that be?

I don't know how hard it would be, but building a big center in the middle of town would be quite stupid. Poor people are all over, not to mention drug users and people who want religious counseling, and now we want to make them all go to one spot in a city that might be 60 or 100 miles or more square? Taken literally, they can't even get rides there because remember, 'all the people who pretend to give a shit' are supposed to be staying permanently at the center.

And what are we supposed to do about poor people who won't even go to the center or stay there? That's one of the pesistent problems with the homeless--they keep going back to being homeless.

There's also a certain ugly implication that people who are taking care of the poor right now are somehow not doing their jobs. And this is just not so.

Cary is just unreal on this.

Is Cary now going to run to the center of his town and start digging the foundations for this 'big building' of his where everybody has to stay until we solve the problem of poverty? Is he even going to do anything at all? Somehow I doubt it. I doubt he will even sort6 of think about what he wrote.

As far as I can understand, he just wrote this silly piece to try to cure the letter writer's earworm on the backs of the poor, who will stay just as poor after Cary's blast as before it. Now that's decadent.

Did you? Or having mouthed the fine words, did you just promptly forget all about it, as no doubt Cary did?

Cary just used the poor to knock off a lazily thought out column. I very much doubt he's right now ladling some hot soup into the trembling hands of the poor.

The answer is FEED SOMEONE.

Or at least feed the cats.

Keillor is writing about himself, not you. He's writing about old folks, not young folks.

...is based on having the right to control your own body. A father doesn't have a right to control another person's body, thus he doesn't have a right to either veto an abortion or demand that one be carried out. It's not his body.

To give a father such rights would violate equality of rights; women would be subject to men, because men would be able to violate their autonomy. It would be giving men extra rights over women.

When a baby is born, it is no longer part of anyone's body and thus there is no question that it's an individual being with rights. Neither the mother nor the father have a right to end its life.

The fact that a father will be held fianacially responsible to take care of the baby has no relevance here. Both the mother and the father will be held equally liable.

...and balding, so no estrogen poisoning likely here.

It's the BABY who demands that both its father and mother take care of it. So if anyone is 'co-opting' male bodies, it's the baby, not the mother. And babies are definitely co-opting women's bodies as well--gosh, maybe even more so, come to think of it.

Fine, says Karl Rove. In fact, Karl says "Hallelujah!" Less support for Democrats means more support for Republicans. This is Basic American Politics 101.

Greenwald needs to grow up and get out and about in the country. He could start by talking to those 16 Democrats and finding out THEIR SIDE OF THE STORY. If he did that, he might actually be better than most journalists, as opposed to being a constant whiner about journalists.

Then he could ask himself how much better off the country would be if those 16 Democrats were replaced by Republicans. After that, he might turn into an interesting thinker instead of a polemical bore.