It's emotional pornography. Which is fine if that is what you need. Everyone needs to look at emotional porn every once in a while. Some people want emotional porn all the time. It can be addicting; hence the popularity of soap operas.

But let's not pretend it is smart and literate just because we like it. Internet porn isn't art and emotional porn isn't smart and literate. Don't let that stop you from looking at it, though. It's ok to like it.

Just be careful. Don't let it rule your life, ok?

couldn't Bush just pardon everyone?

But if Obama is elected and investigations are started after Bush leaves office, then he can't pardon anybody, can he?

Yeah, I know I'm being foolishly optimistic. I know they'll get away with it in the end. But I can dream.

Please.

Girlfriend's addicted to c@ck.

And Edward's is nuthin but a hound dog.

Yeah, that kind of hound.

Same old story. Same old played-out, desperate people who want to be special so bad they'll do just about anything. With anyone. Anywhere, anytime. Especially at the worst time.

These are so dreary.

The article is satirical. It's not about whether you like or dislike air conditioning.

It talks about a very real sociological phenomenon -- about how jobs fled the north once air conditioning allowed the south to become America's first outsourcing location. Laws passed in the south -- "right to work" laws -- made it legal for employers to hire and fire employees at will. Workers in the north had wrangled a decent living wage and pensions and sick pay from companies that had used and discarded workers for centuries. Workers felt that since they gave the best years of their productive lives to companies, they should share the wealth of those companies. Not in the form of profit-sharing as we know it today, but in the form of allowing people injured on the job to get decent health care for their injuries. In the form of getting a pension so they could keep a roof over their heads when they were no longer able to work in backbreaking factory jobs and in mines and slaughetrhouses and collieries. These weren't bad things. It did not break the companies to give health benefits, two weeks vacation and a small pension.

None of these things needed to be offered in the south after right-to-work laws were pushed through state legislatures. So once air conditioning made factory work performable in southern summers, companies relocated there. The local residents felt that working in air conditioned factories beat harvesting cotton and tobacco and sugar and rice in sweltering fields and paddies.

As for why the south hasn't turned more blue after northerners moved down there -- it was cheaper to live there. There were fewer taxes. The low cost of living made lower salaries more acceptable. There was no thought for the fluctuating cost of heating oil, or for the medical care necessary in northern winters as people caught pneumonia, influenza, bronchitis, heart attacks and asthma attacks as they shoveled snow off the streets in order to get to work. Life seemed easier - less fraught with the bleakness of cold, wet, icy weather. Plus - people married locals.

I've seen this in my own family as young men who went south for work married the girls who were available -- Baptist, conservative girls who insisted their children be brought up as they had been. Thus many Northerners who went down there procreated new generations of southern conservatives. And their kids didn't miss what they never had - diversity, job security, guaranteed decent medical care and liveable salaries.

My name has plagued me all my life. My mother named me after a Shakespearean character. In her high school, the nuns pronounced the character's name phonetically. So my mother and the rest of my family pronounce my name phonetically.

But a movie star with the same name pronounces the name non-phonetically (which to my ears is simply incorrect) and that pronunciation has taken hold. I don't mind when someone mispronounces my name ... I simply tell them what the phonetic pronunciation is. What I DO mind is when I introduce myself and the person to whom I am speaking immediately pronounces my name the other way. Uh, I think I know what my name is, dear, and I just TOLD you what it is. You don't get to rename me.

This always happens at doctor and dentists' offices. I don't know what it is about the women who work in those offices, but they simply will not let others hold onto their given names.

I wanted to change my name when I was younger because I was tired of correcting people, but my mother told me she would not call me but whatever name I chose. So I am still stuck with it. Thing is, I cannot simply "switch to" the non-phonetic pronunciation of my name because I hate it. I hate the way it sounds. I like my pronunciation so much better.

It is not the nuns who mispronounced my name. Their version is the correct one.

Rant, rant, rant, complain, complain, complain.

These young whippersnappers! They think they know something! Hmmmph! Why, in my day... in my day....I was a POW!

And my jaw dropped.

I thought maybe Jeff Gannon ghostwrote it.