I guess this discussing of meta issues is interesting to some, but down in the trenches, my freecycle group just continues to chug along finding new owners for things that their old owners no longer needed. I sure hope these PR activities don't do anything to destroy the really good stuff that is happening on the person-to-person level.

Just wait until you're a little older and get laid off a few times. Then you'll learn what sort of "loyalty" business owners have toward their employees.

I had one job, we were all being pushed to work overtime and get the product out by the end of the year. One co-worker joked, "And then we'll all be laid off." No surprise when on Jan 3 60% of us were, in fact, laid off.

There is no loyalty in the business world. That's just the way it is.

They warm up the speculum before inserting it because they know what it feels like.

My main objection to this proposal is that it basically turns control over our elections to the news media, since most people would base their donation on the candidates that have gotten the most publicity.

It's amazing to me that people would presume to tell Elizabeth Edwards how she should choose to live the last years of her life. Certainly others might have made a different decision, but what does that have to do with what is right for Elizabeth and her family. Butt out, people.

But so far I haven't seen any discussion of Elizabeth's other choice, the choice which we can all learn from. Based on a quote from her biography, I learned that she discovered her original cancer herself, after 4 years without having a mammogram. Four years which gave that original cancer time to spread and perhaps the reason why the original treatment did not succeed.

Please, everyone who is female and reading this note, please go and get your routine mammograms. It can make a huge difference if you catch your breast cancer early enough so it can be easily and successfully treated.

Mine was caught 6 years ago when it wasn't even a lump yet, just a suspicious pattern of calcification dots on a mammogram. I had surgery and radiation, but didn't need to go through chemotherapy and I've been cancer-free since then.

Please get your routine mammograms. Your life depends on it.

Using the "we can't endanger the troops" meme is not a new tactic for the Republicans. I was just watching Robert Greenwald's 2006 film Iraq for Sale. One of the special features on the DVD gives the whole sorry history of Democratic attempts to put some controls on war profiteering. As one example, they attempted to pass an amendment to a bill to require that no funding go to companies that had been previously found to have defrauded the government by more than 100 million dollars. Yeah, that's right. No attempt to put them in jail, just saying that they can have the first 100 million free, but after that it's got to stop. A pretty weak amendment, you might think. But the Republicans weren't having it, and their main argument was that it "might disrupt supplies getting to the troops". The moral bankrupcy of this den of thieves is breathtaking in its audacity. It pains me to see the Democrats knuckle under to them.

I just spent two weeks as a volunteer helping to allocate the funding designated under the Elder Americans Act to my local Area Agency on Aging that covers eight towns. Next year's funding for our programs, covering medical transportation, legal aid, health education, caregiver support, and other types of elder assistance, comes to just about 2 minutes of the Iraq war.

The fact that we're willing squander trillions in pursuit of the elusive goal of ending terrorism, rather than on people who are really in need, where small amounts of money can have a huge impact, is just sick.

I don't think that our agressive stance, which has made just about everyone else in the world hate us, to the point where we stand alone on the world stage, has made us safer at all. I feel that we are now terribly vulnerable, more so that we've been at any time in my lifetime. Not just militarily, but also economically. If we don't change our path, I see our next twenty years as being a slow decline in our standard of living. We already see the problems with medical care, where we are now lagging behind the rest of the world. In years to come, I expect we will see fuel shortages and even food shortages as well.

It may be a dangerous world out there, but we've got to try to find a way to live within it. To stand alone against it is a sure recipe for disaster.

I'm an old geezer and listen mostly to 60's music, but I discovered that for some strange reason Green Day's American Idiot is great exercise music. There is just something about it that makes me want to move (and not much does that for me these days).

I listen on my iPod, and recently added noise-cancelling headphones for the gym to try to muffle their horrible background music.

Attendees at the convention were given the choice of one candidate roundtable to attend. The announcement that Hillary would not appear was made after people had already made their choices. So the people who had picked Hillary's roundtable felt screwed because they no longer had the opportunity to switch to Obama or Edwards' meetings.

And how's that been working out for you?