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.

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.