I was a Massachusetts resident for many years, and I've been watching Mitt Romney's political career for even longer. So I couldn't be more positive when I say this:

Mitt Romney would do anything for a shot at the Presidency. Flip-flopping is just the start. He'd kill, or pimp his own mother to improve his chances. Remember Martin Sheen as the bad President in The Dead Zone? That's Romney. He'd gladly kill a baby to gain a few votes, if that would do it.

There is no stand he wouldn't change, NOTHING he wouldn't do. Sell out the US to the Chinese government? In a heartbeat, if he really believed it would secure the Presidency for him.

I know this all sounds crazy, but if Romney wins I'll be pointing to this post within three years and saying "I TOLD you so!".

And as someone else mentioned - he's completely incompetent. His major political assets are his looks, his connections to the LDS church, and his absolutely lack of any principles whatsoever. His administration in Massachusetts was as incompetent as the Bush Administration - I'd say more so, but that's not possible.

The collapse of the Big Dig happened on his watch. The MA economy is NOT doing well - major businesses are fleeing like mad. His much-touted universal health plan is an unimplementable joke, foisting punitive fines on those too poor to pay for health care. Virtually every government service went down the toilet under Romney.

The "Efficient Republican Businessman" Romney rep is perhaps the biggest joke of all.

I wrote an email to him about dangerous, life-threatening conditions on the commuter rail (some lines are routinely given too few coaches, and typically have twenty or more people standing in the aisles in each coach - a definite hazard if there were to be an accident, as has happened fairly often). How long did it take Mr. Efficiency's office to respond?

Five months.

Five months to respond with a kiss-off form email. And of course, nothing has been done.

It horrifies me that people are taking this man seriously as a candidate. And it dismays me that I have to place my hopes in the religious bigotry of the southern Religious Right.

The fact is that female-on-male rape and/or sexual molestation is consistently ignored, downplayed, and even turned into a joke in this society - no matter what the age of those involved.

Yet the psychological effect can be devastating for the male victim - with the difference being that the male victim is less likely to be able to find help in dealing with the aftereffects of their trauma, assuming they are able to overcome cultural conditioning (shame and confusion) to report the crime or seek help in the first place. The odds are very high that they'll be told that they should be grateful for the experience!

Pregnancy isn't possible for males, so of course that particular danger doesn't exist for male victims of female rapists. But of course the female could become pregnant, which in some cases has serious lifetime ramifications for the male victim. In any case, if the risk of pregnancy was the sole criteria of the damage that rape causes, infertile women would have no cause to complain about being raped. Heck, they should probably just be grateful that they got laid! Right?

That's the response that most male victims face if they manage to work up the courage to ask for help.

Note that just like female victims, male victims can be exposed to STDs as a result of rape. And they get even less support from society than female victims do. I doubt that there's a single male rape victim who doesn't feel as if he's the only one in the world to have gone through that experience.

We don't know how many male victims of female rapists there are, since the crime is even more under-reported than male-on-female rape. I'm not aware of any extensive studies on the topic. But I suspect that the problem is a lot more widespread than most people suspect.

"Bush: Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace and Prosperity Is Over". And they wrote that only days after Bush was first inaugurated.

The ironic thing is that reality has turned out to be much more extreme than their story predicted. But of course, if they'd predicted that things would turn out as badly as they actually did, it would have been too extreme to be funny.

Refrigerating aloe for sunburns actually makes sense, if you think about it - not to preserve the aloe, but because chilled aloe feels a LOT better on a bad sunburn.