I don't think the Obama white hosue is acting the way it is out of a dedication to bi-partisanship. Rahm Emanuel is nobody's fool.

What they are doing is playing politics. They want a second term of unimpeded majorities. So they are selling off chunks of health care to the highest bidder----hospitals? Do you promise to support us and to NOT support the republicans if we throw you billions in this thing? Big Pharma? We want your support and more importnatly, we want it exclusively. How about another medicare Part D to make oyu happy? And INSURNCE COMPANIES! We can work together! Not one penny to the GOP and we will see to it that we screw over the common man's health care.

THAT is what Obama is doing. He is showing himself to be just another pol.

I always think that sooner or later Cary will run out of things to write about and then there's another letter that encompasses a huge part of my life.

First of all I have two brothers---both right wing republican engineers of the mindset that if you are poor in the US, it's your own damned fault for not having any ambition. Also of the mindset that I am in need of help and to them, that means, tough love. In other words, unsolicited "advice" that is invariably cruel, mean, hurtful.

But they're easy to dismiss.

However, my best friend in the world, someone I have known since our first day of kindergarten, someone I have gone through all that life has to offer with (parents dying, marriage, divorce, educational successes and failures, work success and failures, cancer (hers), alzheimer's (my mother's)..... is a staunch republican. Her whole family is. We long ago decided that politics had to be off limits. And yet, during the last election, she repeatedly sent me those appalling mass anti-Obama emails. Just as I would finish responding to the 48 "lies Obama told" with carefully-done research, along would come another.

I knew she was getting these things from her idiot brother in law, and that she was sending them to me so i would do the legwork of refuting them, should she choose to do that. And so after a few of them, with the campaign heating up, my working on the campaign, and hating Sarah Palin, I blew up in an email and demanded she stop forwarding emails from her idiot brother in law, and ignorant stupid family in general.

She hasn't spoken to me since. I have apologized. Nothing. Months passed. I apologized again, and now we're working our way back. Very very slowly.

Here is the thing. Even though the republicans in our lives ARE stupid and ignorant and clueless, the fact of the matter is they have feelings too and don't want to be told that they are stupid, ignorant and clueless. So you just have to shut up. Just shut up. And most of all, never commit anything like this, especially in the heat of the moment, to paper (or email for that matter). It will haunt you forever.

There is new biological research that shows that conservatives and liberals are anatomically different in their neural wiring. It suggests a hard-right thinker may not have the ability to switch to liberal thinking.

So think of them as the handicapped souls they are, and be kind. It's the only answer.

My dryer broke a year ago and I haven't been able to afford to get it fixed or to buy a new one. So i hang everything to dry in my basement on dsrying racks.

and I have to say, it's not big deal. In fact, it's better for your clothes.

However, your husband is a jerk. You're paying for him to go to graduate school, and he won't let you have hot water? Why are you putting up with that?

There is no way this guy gets on the daily show and then gets his OWN show unless he's related to a network executive. He makes me cringe. I am sorry but cringe-inspiring does NOT mean hip.

Look, we have all been in this situation at some point---or at least one like it. When it happened to me, I was totally shell-shocked. Trapped in a horrifically humiliating situation, not even believing he could be so mean and hurtful and apparently clueless about it.

I walked away from it. I was devastated and humiliated and just mortified. He dumped me for someone younger and better looking. I cried and cried and cried. He wrote me an email later and said we were such good friends and come on, don't be like that. He tried to shame ME for standing up for myself.

It took a really really long time, but now, I can look back at that experience and I can feel proud of myself for not letting this guy walk all over me. I am proud of not buying into the idea that being humiliated was something I was not right in resenting. I fairly shouted, with class, that I was not going to play that game.

Cary is kind in saying you are relegating yourself into the not great-looking corner and not giving us a chance to talk you out of that. But I am that way, too. I am not thin and never will be. I have a big nose. My smile is shaped weirdly. I have a saggy neck. Look, we don't all win the genetic lottery and when that's true, you DO accept bad treatment more habitually than other people do. Outrage at the inherent low self-esteem that reveals is not helpful.

So this time, make sure you say "I deserve to be treated better and you callously hurt my feelings and I will not say that was ok." And then walk away. And maybe that's how you get out of that corner.