Unbelievable. First it was the treatment of Hillary by the media that made me sick. 'Ball busting power crazed icy unsympathetic Hillary'. Then it was Michelle: 'ungrateful, angry ... by the right wing AND left wing press ...

The UK's Guardian Weekly hit a new low when their take on her spectacular performance at the Democrat Convention was an article on 'Purple is back' because she wore a purple dress. But now with this on Sarah Palin ...

IT IS EXHAUSTING the way you people - and I mean you people as in you media people - cannot stop fetishizing women in terms of what they wear, what they must be like in bed, what their relationship with their significant men must be like.

It's just so revealing about how you see women generally, and when the journalist is a woman, how they must see themselves.

It just makes me sick. It is just so intimidating to any and all women out there including myself who would ever think about running for political office or any position of authority. To know that you will have to run the gamut of this kind of offensive speculation that does nothing but bring women down. It really pisses me off.

It's not the word - it's the hate and the ignorance and discrimination that resonates with the word. That's why it useful sometimes to rename something when the associations with the original word - such as 'retarded' - have become too hate filled and aggressive and frightening to be useful any longer.

When something is sometimes or often used as an insult it loses its descriptive value and becomes a term of abuse - whether or not you personally mean it that way. And there's quite enough miscommunication in the world for it to be very easy to mean a word one way and for it be heard another way. Particularly when those words refer to people who are different, disadvantaged and often discriminated against, such as people with a mental disability.

So: it's not 'politically correct' - it's sensitive and it's empowering to use words that refer to REAL people with REAL problems carefully.

My child right now is developmentally delayed. He may or may not catch up and become 'normal'. He has special needs. I can't tell you, as his parent, how much it means to me that he has high self esteem and feels good about himself, and I can't describe the gratitude I feel to his community of other children and parents and teachers and therapists who display so much love and sensitivity every day that supports him to be the happy, confident, outgoing and loving kid that he is.

If people acted differently, for example used words like 'retarded' and generally mocked or ignored how this might make me or him feel, we would have a very different little boy right now I'm sure, and I would be feeling very differently about life myself.

It DOES matter.

I say this as a child of two people who went through TEN BAD YEARS together in an otherwise very happy 55 year relationship. My mother says it was worth it for the happiness they had before, the happiness they have now, and all that they didn't lose by divorcing.

I have just been reading about the pioneers, and it helps put the bad times we are having now into perspective. They are bad, but they could be worse, and people have endured worse, and people have held on, and have held on together.

Because that's the other terribly sad thing about bad times forcing you apart. You and your husband are the only ones who will ever truly understand how hard it's been. Whoever your future partner is, and whatever hard times you go through together (and you will) you will have to bear the memory of this alone.

If things were good between you once they can be again. Please reconsider.

After the French Revolution they ran tours through the bedchambers of the Royal Court at Versailles. Isn't there some way of doing that at least in the Hamptons?

Thanks Vasamurti. Especially liked the Einstein quote.

I can't imagine why this book would be published now except to feed the insatiable American hunger for more weird and wacky and immoderate food gimmicks, which is the whole problem in the first place.

There is no special secret trick. The answer, the cure for our diet related woes is so simple, so obvious, and so UNPROFITABLE that it's as if people can't quite believe it's real - or maybe it's just too boring. But it works!

Eat plants mainly. Go for as wide a variety as possible. Eat grains. Eat nuts and legumes. If you eat meat, eat just a little bit, free range and organic, a few times a month. And don't eat too much.

Ta da!