For those of you who are bringing up Al Sharpton -- Al Sharpton does not have a multimillion dollar yearly contract with NBC. Don Imus does. Sharpton is a freelancer. He can say what he wants and the media either chooses to cover his remarks or not. Don Imus, on the other hand, has several hours of publicly-owned airwaves at his disposal every single weekday morning, paid for by a giant media conglomerate.

That's the difference.

Sharpton speaks for himself and he hustles for airtime because of his freelance status. Don Imus represents media giant NBC. NBC may pretend he doesn't, but the truth is it pays Imus millions of dollars to represent NBC every day. The question isn't whether NBC should fire Al Sharpton for what he says. They can't. They can, however, fire their well-paid spokesman Don Imus for what he says. They choose not to. They are far more disingenuous than bold-faced self-promotor Al Sharpton. At least Sharpton stands by what he says, while NBC promotes the charade that Imus does not speak for their media empire.

Come on! When the guys who produce weapons, explosives, aircraft, ships, chemicals, telecommunications equipment, earth-moving equipment, location-detection equipment, night-vision technology, etc own the media outlets, what do you expect? Documentaries on migrant workers? Please!

Settle in for more years of this. The mainstream press isn't "waking up." They aren't learning any "lessons." Have you seen the Washington Post lately? They've got essays, news articles and editorials that completely contradict each other in the same day's edition of the paper. They've got an ombudsman who deliberately repeats lies (excuse me, I forgot to use the media's pet word for lies: "misstatements") and when the ombudsman is called on her lie for the second time, she engages in a smear campaign against the people who have repeatedly corrected her.

Don't look for the situation to improve. People will do anything to keep a job. Remember when you went to an appliance store and the person who worked there knew all about appliances? That appliance store doesn't exist anymore. A mega-retailer now hires people temporarily and rotates them through different departments - appliances, sporting goods, baby gear, bedding, household storage. Your chances of getting reliable advice from someone in the megastore is roughly about the same chance you have of getting actual truth from someone in the mainstream media. The guy in the megastore's appliance section isn't going to say to you "Look, I have no fucking idea about this stove. Yesterday I was selling fish food, next week I'll be over in tires." He has a family, a mortgage. He wants to keep his job.

The same thing is true in mainstream newspapers, magazines and on television. Today they're doing Baghdad. Yesterday it was the father of Anna Nichole Smith's baby; tomorrow it will be shark attacks; next week it's the real estate bubble, anorexia and an in-depth look at Laura Bush, a nice-looking lady nobody dislikes.

That's just the way it is now. The media isn't the message; the media is Walmart. They sell stories on consignment for other manufacturers.

And I sometimes wonder if I will be seen as the person who babysat for 18 years.

You forgot to invoke Catholics For a Free Choice when you mentioned Bill Donohue's name. I passed the link on to a friend of mine, a Catholic women's health nurse practitioner who was thrilled with the organization, especially when she saw Susan Wysocki, RNC, NP President and CEO of the National Association of Nurse Practitioners in Women's Health in Washington, DC is on the board of Catholic's For a Free Choice.

See, you already did good by mentioning them once. Keep it up.

I was always hearing him demand money from others for his "charity" -- $2.6 million a year to house 100 kids for 10 weeks at his sprawling ranch where the aim was to "teach responsibility through work" to kids with cancer. Sounds less than charitable to me to want to teach responsibility to kids with a terminal medical condition. Of course, he got to spend his holidays at the ranch during those 42 weeks of the year when he wasn't having a few sick kids out there cattle rustling.

He's also one of those cranks insisting that thimerosal causes autism without mentioning that Denmark banned thimerosal in the 1990s and has seen an increase, not a decrease, in autism.

One less crank pushing junk science to worried parents is another good thing to result from this.

Wouldn't a certificate called a Stillbirth Certificate make sense? Weigh and measure the baby, give his or her name and the time of stillbirth just like on a birth certificate. A Stillbirth Certificate could serve the same purpose as a death certificate and a birth certificate. You would be acknowledging the baby's birth and death, like everyone else's birth and death. Would such a certificate be insensitive?