>I have never been able to figure out why any woman or man would move 4000 miles to be with someone without some commitment.<

Ain't it the truth. LW, in addition to moving on from this guy, you should develop your life/hobbies/interests/other relationships enough so that you have a life outside of the guys you love. Uprooting just to be with someone is a strategy that guarantees heartbreak nine times out of ten. That kind of turmoil may seem romantic, but it keeps you from shaping your own life--and becomes an escape from the fact you haven't. Don't get in the habit of constantly throwing it all away "for love;" because that's the surest way to end up with no love or no life.

...it's the fact these parents keep harping on their daughter's sex life in various open and passive-aggressive ways. The holidays just give them a perfect change to unload on LW full-barrel and up-close-and-personal. For the holidays, I'd do what other posters have suggested: stay at a hotel; have several conversation-diverting subjects at hand when at parents' house; spend only as much time with them as one can stand. They seem determined to punish you (and avoid looking at their own failings, most likely.) Don't give them the chance.

>For a lot of people around here, Bush is like the president of Texas, and supporting the soldiers means supporting Bush."<

And that's the kind of mindless groupthink that got "you all" (and the rest of the world) in this disaster in the first place. And it's the kind of mindless groupthink that keeps folks like you for falling for these "guys we wanna have a beer with" every single time. I'm sorry for the soldiers, but I'm not sorry for anyone deluded enough to put Bush into office and is suffering the fallout--fallout that everyone with sense knew was coming. Bush voters had plenty of warning and the evidence was there he was a lousy leader. They didn't _want_ to see the truth; they wanted "Big Daddy." Now they are reaping what they sowed--and the rest of us get to suffer along with them. And you can bet (as the first thread poster noted) they'd sooner hack off their arms than not vote for a GOP-ite who is going to continue the same mess.

>More Texans than people from any other state have served in those wars.<

An irony easily foreseen.

>"I was very enthusiastic for Bush when he first ran, embarrassingly so looking back now," says Paul Burka, executive editor of Texas Monthly magazine. A political independent who has covered Texas politics for 30 years, Burka twice voted for Bush for president.<

Er...shouldn't the Texas press have known from the start Bush was an empty hat? Molly Ivins surely couldn't have been the only one to see that this guy was a loser...?

>It isn't really schadenfreude to see the evils descending like an Acme anvil on top of Texans.<

Heh. Nicely put...g!

>It is a logical consequence of their own actions, their insularity and their conceit. As a result, it isn't proper to laugh at them.<

This mess hasn't been funny, ever. Those Texans responsible for Bush would be _lucky_ if people felt kindly enough to laugh at them.

>...that racist tenet of the BOM has been neither abolished nor fully repudiated...<

And that's a major reason I don't trust Mormons. Hell, there are enlightened liberals who still occasionally have racist moments. Why on earth should I trust anyone from a xenophobic religion that won't strike down this tenet--and has very few African-American Mormons for that exact reason?

>...childless working women feel that they've sacrificed something vital — motherhood — for their careers and resent their peers with families who appear to be having their cake and eating it too.<

There it is again--the assumption that childfree people are just deprived parents who are consumed with jealousy over the married-with-kids. That's the most infuriating thing about dealing with childed attitudes--some folks don't realize that it is the childed's denigrating of our basic rights and blithe dismissal of our lives as inconsequential that gets the childfree angry..._not_ that the latter feels deprived of children. The childfree aren't resentful over some nonexistent sacrifice--they are angry because the childed treat them as if their time and lives aren't important...as if the childfree are just adjuncts for the "famblee."

>Miranda Priestly has children and expects her childfree assistants to do childcare related work like track down hard to find Harry Potter manuscripts ...<

Miranda may have kids, but it's clear she defines herself totally by her work and position. That is everything to her, even if she cares about her children. And it's made pretty evident that she gets her kids the HP manuscripts (and the best of everything) because she feels utterly entitled as a powerful wealthy executive. Therefore, her character plays into every stereotype about selfish career women.

>I'm an independant. Don't make me want to stay home in 2008 from fear that voting from Democrats will remove accomodations for mothers in the workplace.<

Because as we all know, your vote is _all_ about you and your kids. Jesus, domini, do you think that voting in Democrats might help a teeny-tiny bit with problems beyond you and your family? Attitudes like this are the reason the childed get so much resentment--the world seems to only exist for them and their kids to use it...or run away from it.