My wife's great aunt dated a famous man's assistant in the '20s. He failed to give her an engagement ring in spite of their sexual escapades. She sued for "breach of promise" and was awarded her first fortune.

Our only cultural advance since then seems to be to take away a woman's means of profiting from our screwed up values.

By the way, Auntie had previously worked as an expensive call-girl.

A few months ago Thomas Friedman of the NY Times wrote an article about his travels to Denmark. He noted that 50% of the Danes were getting to work by bicycle, rain or shine. Maybe they are happier because of the benefits of daily exercise. Maybe the fact that so many of them are not driving around terrorizing cyclists has an effect on their happiness. Then again, since this all came from "free trade" Friedman, maybe he just saw two bikes and made up the rest.

I was raised to value two things in a person above all else: honesty and empathy. Needless to say, I have not seen much of value in the Republican Party in my lifetime.

I once worked with a short, fat, club-footed bisexual man. His research involved "nude" mice (athymic mice that are hairless). One day he got everyone laughing by declaring, "Two things are ugly, nude mice and nude men."

Miss Utah may have something in common with old Aaron.

Maybe we can give a few tens of millions of dollars to Greg Mortenson and let him have a crack at Afghanistan and Pakistan. Let's help open schools, build health clinics and secure safe water supplies instead of killing everyone who moves. That would be some change that I could believe in.

Is Obama Dick Cheney's cousin, or suave fraternal twin?

This is all about preventing the rabble from forcing the prosecution of the Bush Crime Family. If pictures of children being sodomized come out, even some Republicans will be calling for prosecution. Of course, no one from the elite political establishment can allow any other elites to be called to answer for their crimes, thus Obama is continuing the coverup. I really miss things like the rule of law and the Constitution.

Regarding those foreclosures: Alan Greenspan talked yesterday about the housing market having hit the bottom. Methinks he has mistaken bumping into the cliffside for hitting the bottom. I guess when one has spent one's entire career hanging out with folks who don't rely on a job for income it is easy to forget how important jobs are. I wonder if he ever heard of FDR, WPA and CCC.

Over a quarter-century ago, the SCOTUS decided a reverse-discrimination case (Bakke, sp) wherein it essentially said that Universities could use race and other criteria in their admissions process because a diverse student body enhanced everyone's education by bringing in points of view that would otherwise not come up. It is high time such an approach was applied to the SCOTUS itself.

Over thirty years after anthropogenic climate change became a solid hypothesis, fifteen years after it became a testable and tested model, ten years after it became irrefutable, we still have no regulations limiting the emissions of greenhouse gasses (except chlorofluorocarbons, but for a different reason). I know Obama has only been in office a few months, but for him to not hit the ground running on the most critical problem in human history is a bit disappointing.

I suppose it is up to those of us who would like our grandchildren to have a livable world to make it happen. If the millions of Americans who CLAIM to want something done about climate change would just stop heating their buildings over 60F and stop driving, things would happen. Unfortunately, right now people who take substantial steps to reduce their carbon footprints are scoffed at, ridiculed, and, in the case of bicyclists, attacked and killed. Let's give the President some political cover by being the change we say we want.

Considering that there is an inelastic supply limit of around 92 million barrels of oil per day (a limit that will likely get lower in the future), our current dependence on cheap oil as an economic driver leaves us trapped. If the economy recovers, oil demand increases and, when demand approaches the supply limit, oil prices will explode and the economy will be pushed back. Perversely, oil producers have little incentive to increase supplies as prices rise since they will have a reasonable expectation that the future will bring still higher prices.

If we are going to get out of the oil trap, we need to find ways to manage our economy without using so much oil. Considering the immense quantities of oil wasted by Americans' choice to use cars as their only means of local transportation (and the fact that most of this driving does not contribute to our economy in any way other than to increase the value of my oil stocks), the answer is as obvious as the rather large deposits of adipose on an average American. Our economy is literally being driven into the ground.