but you're (deliberately?) missing what I said. I object to people, yourself included, saying all crimes are equal. If I heist a candy bar from the 7-11, I should receive the same penalty as the Green River Killer? Illegal is illegal, eh? Second, I did not say undocumented entry is not illegal - I said it was not a criminal offense, but a civil offense. Look it up. Do a little research, and clean out your ears.

I hereby withdraw my earlier irritation. And except for lack of paragraphing, there's really only one piece I think you - and the rest of us - are missing - and that's the effect of NAFTA. And for that, Andrew Leonard in his Salon column on how the world wags, covers the topic quite well.

and it's not your MD-type doctor. Pharmacists tend to be much more knowledgeable and current, and don't have quite so many myths about drugs (steroids work better than mast-cell inhibiters for asthma prevention; african-americans should always take thiazides for hypertensions; newest meds are best). Having said that, though, the people at your busy corner drugstore may not have time to stay current or to talk, although it's worth a try. But clinical phamracists & professors at your nearby school of pharmacy can be very helpful.

Case in point: a pharmacist friend persuaded me that our asthmatic kids would do better on the aforementioned mast-cell inhibitors (which is mostly cromolyn, aka Inatol) rather than steroids, with less side effects. Your typical MD consider cromolyn useful only for very mild asthma, since it is seen as not as effective, not as strong, as steroids. It's not really a matter of strength - it's that the action is entirely different, and pharmacists understand this better.

pay a visit sometime to New Haven, Connecticut. I once interviewed there for a faculty job. We entered the building, part of the med school, through a door with a keypad and then signed in with a security guard. The junior faculty who had school children assured me that everyone on Yale faculty sends their kids to private schools, which were 'wonderful'. And housing was reasonable in safe areas of town. It wasn't just a town-gown problem, it was very much a black-white problem. I was offered the job; decided to go elsewhere.

My daughter, age 21, is helping with her way through school working as an emergency med tech with a huge ambulance company, AMR. She works the 911 calls, wich here means Fire show up too. There's paperwork always, and often the firemen need to borrow a pen. For a while my daughter was losing pens to these guys. Then she got an idea, and it works....for pens to loan to firemen, she has a supply of pink pens. They come back every time, no need for reminders or anything.

One of the biggest problems we have is being unable to think of a decent republican who could believably run for POTUS. That's why so many of us get hung up on guys like McCain. To quote a bumper sticker I saw a few years ago, "Why vote for the lesser of two evils? Cthulu for President!"

a guy who snuck up behind her while she was getting some supplies out of her ambulance (she's an EMT) - he tried for a hammerlock and she used a kenpo technique called 'locked wing'. He ended up on the ground with a broken nose, didn't get to use his razor, and five deputy sheriffs holding him while advsing him that he shouldn't try to assault EMTs, even smallish female ones. AND, she has a tee-shirt that says "It's tough being a princess." BUT she's technically qualified - her great-aunt was the last ruling queen of Korea.

our current culture makes much of written records, something that the early Christian church considered important as a proof of legitimacy as well. And historians in particular tend to be cautious almost to the point of scorn about oral records. A case in point is the life of Sacajawea after the L&C expedition. Did she die not long after the expedition, going back upriver with Charbonneau, as Clark's written diaries say, or did she live many years more with Apaches or Comanches in the southwest, eventually moving to the Wind River country in Wyoming, there to die as a very old woman, as Indian oral traditions claim? And this is a story not very far removed from the present at all. Someone else mentioned Homer, another example of oral records, since it seems Homer was as much a bard as anything and it's likely the Illiad and Odyessiad were sung, as an aid to memory. I have friends who can sing entire operas, but reciting them would be beyond them. The music really helps, and of course a lot of the religious texts of the churches of Jesus' time were sung.

I have a good friend who's a retired major general of the Army Rangers, did service in wars back to the Spanish-American War, I think, and he not only thinks Rumsfeld is a complete idiot, he's irritated with his colleagues who are just now realizing it. He also votes usually for the democrats, occassionally for the greens. He's also quite elderly, as you may have guessed by my mention of the wars he served in (I was exaggerating slightly - he's in his mid-80s) and has health problems, but the feds keep cutting his health care benefits. He lives on a small ranch and is very worried that he may have to sell off the land to pay for his own care, and not leave anything to his grandchild whom he dotes on. He did, by the way, serve in the Vietnam war, but he would've much preferred not to, even at the time when he was asked to.