Although my first reaction to Romney was that I could never vote for someone who believed in such nonsense as the Mormon religion, I realized that the "standard" Christian faiths are also based on nonsense, as several others have commented.

And again, it's not his religious beliefs that alarm me so much as his stated political beliefs. I could never vote for him for anything.

Sorry, but all this cartoon reminds me of is one time I attended the "Doodah Parade," in Pasadena, the weekend after Thanksgiving. One of the entries, from the Newport Beach Men's Club, featured the members of the club, each wearing a distinctive hat, and each holding a leaf blower with leaves attached to it by a string. The entry got a lot of laughs.

Somehow, page 3 didn't appear. The link simply led me to the letters. Oh, well...

Ann, you said, "for a few moments, I lay in bliss. Uncertain of where I ended and God began."

That doesn't surprise me. In my belief system, God is within me, and within you, and within your son, too. But then I don't believe in a Big Daddy up in the sky. And I don't believe that the bible is the "holy word of God."

I hope your son recovers his earlier connection with God. Bless him.

Without passing moral judgments on anyone, I truly believe that having a baby outside of marriage is a bad choice. My (step)daughter wanted a baby more than anything else, more than an education, more than a career, more, even, than a marriage.

And so, at the age of 18, she managed to get pregnant and had her baby. Later, she even married the baby's father, a marriage that only lasted a short time.

After the end of that marriage, she married another man, who sired four more children for her. I say "sired" because he didn't stick around to be their father.

Eventually, she told me she didn't want her children to do what she had done.

Now, her third son has sired a child, not yet born. When I heard about this unborn child, I asked him if he and the baby's mother were going to get married. He said, "Yeah, some day."

He thought his mother would be happy about his future child. I told him that wasn't what she told me. (Unfortunately, she died more than a year ago.) I hope I wasn't too harsh on him, but I doubt he'll ever marry his baby's mother. And so it goes on unto another generation.

Unmentioned in the article were the devastating effects of the dust storms of the thirties. A contemporary equivalent, such as the great drought spreading across the southern and southwestern regions of the country, could have equally devastating effects, connecting to the residue of the housing bubble that has popped.

I think we're going to be visited by that ancient Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times.

Thank you for your excellent analysis of this situation:

"CALEA is a truly ominous precedent for America. The subordination of private industry to the directives of a national police agency is an authoritarian concept that is completely at odds with the philosophical underpinnings of the U.S. Constitution. Unfortunately, that disturbing legal trend shows no sign of abating. Recent "anti-terrorism'' proposals seek to draw the airline, hotel, and financial services industries into the government's network of private informers and data gatherers. Such proposals will probably resurface in the near future."

Let's all write letters or emails about it to our congress-critters.

What I remember most about 1968 is that I was very frightened. I was a young stay-at-home mom, pregnant with my third child, in San Diego. It was in the depths of the Cold War, and nuclear annihilation seemed eminent. It was a year of assassinations, followed by riots all across the country. We were blessed in San Diego never to have any riots. All across the country, too, anti-war protests were growing, and at the Democratic convention in Chicago that summer, the police brutalized peace demonstrators in a "police riot."

I was so frightened of living in a city environment, I let my husband talk me into moving away from my beautiful home town, and my family, to a farm in Minnesota. He was from South Dakota, and had lived some of the time on a farm when he was a boy. We chose Minnesota instead of South Dakota because we thought he could get a much better job as an electronics engineer at one of the large computer companies in and around the Twin Cities.

And so it came to pass. After our third son was born, we moved with everything we owned from beautiful, mild San Diego to the Twin Cities area, where it was 20 below zero.

I was fortunate never to have had a close loved one who had to go to Viet Nam. My husband was a veteran of the Korean War. And I never participated in any demonstrations or protests. I was focused on caring for my family. So my experience of 1968 was very mild, compared to so many others. And yet it was a year of fear for me.

This story reminds me of an occasion when a female co-worker attended a Halloween party dressed as a "pregnant man." She wore masculine clothing, with a pillow tucked in at the belly, and a beard and mustache drawn on with eyebrow pencil.

Otherwise, I have no comments about this story.