If it is not the wifes (mothers) duty, whose is it? Neither industry nor the government can be trusted. Non-profit organizations that supposedly promote health are controlled by special interest groups. Go to the diabetes web site and see how they push bad carbs. Luckily, both my wife and I are very interested in nutrition, and low cost eating. Good nutrition and low cost go hand in hand.

Sorry about the slap at lesbians, but many of the letters appeared to equate marriage and child rearing to some form of slavery, and the lesbian life as somehow superior to heterosexual marriage for women . So I (not so innocently) wanted to know what feminism and lesbianism had to do with nutrition and weight gain in mothers.

My wife is a hot heterosexual, and she is not shy about iterating my duties as a husband. She's also a grandmother who carefully raised her daughters to be good mothers.

Those who believe that regulation is the answer, read the above. If you are unfamiliar with the Latin phrase, you have no business discussing technology or politics.

Federal regulation always falls into the control of those who are regulated. However, in an open society the people can do the regulation. That is what I meant. It requires a sufficient number of intelligent and interested people who are willing to do the job. No matter how dedicated and smart the bureaucratic regulators might be, they will be corrupted by the Congress. Look at the FDA, the USDA, bank regulation. They all have ended up being used to screw the rest of us, and benefit the special interests.

Passive aggressives always appear reasonable after they have totally screwed someone over. There is a lot more here than the LW will let on.

Both parties talk about our "interests" in the Middle East and Central Asia. The only interest we have there is oil. It is the elephant in the room, that neither party will directly address. Bush is not really a Republican, but he is the President who represents the oil interests in Houston and Saudi Arabia. Where did Cheney run to just after the election? Riyadh. It might be legitimate for us to protect our oil "interests" in the Middle East and Central Asia. The real question is who should pay for it, and how. If the Republicans were true to their conservative beliefs they would tax imported oil for the entire cost of maintaining our "interests." That would have two salutary effects: it would raise the price of fuel and reduce consumption, and probably eliminate the deficit. Don't hold your breath.

You take too much work. Even if you're a real babe, all that effort every time you have sex isn't worth it. Most studies of sex show that 14 minutes is the typical human time from initial interest to completion. Other primates take shorter or longer times. Most men and women are designed for 14 minutes, so someone like you is an outlier. The men aren't lazy; you're just not normal. There are probably a few men out there who are like you. If you find one you better keep him.

Most of those "enlightened" companies seem to be in financial trouble. Excessively generous medical benefits for the few drive up the cost of medical car for the rest of us. You are right that many of the uninsured are uninsured by choice, and are willing to self-insure. The Democrats are desperate to force these people to enter their socialist single payer scheme in order to subsidize the sickies. The answer of course is to follow the course being laid out by Schwarzenegger in California. Make the uninsured buy a major med plan and allow them to save money in an HSA. Health insurance as desired by Democrats is more aptly described as health socialism. It is extremely regressive to tax the healthy to subsidize the poor and sickly. It would be much better to use a more broadly based tax to subsidize them. If the subsidy came from the general fund it would far more progressive, something I thought the Democrats liked.

BTW, my wife swears by DHEA. It's the precursor to testosterone. She assiduously takes her 25 mg per day. Swears it keeps her libido up and makes her very orgasmic. I need 50 mg a day to keep up.

This is a far more diverse nation than most others. It is very difficult to reach a national consensus on anything. I have nothing against socialism where you can get 90% of the citizens to agree on some social issue. I am somewhat peculiar, as are millions of others, in wanting to control my own health spending. I believe that we can get some form of catastrophic coverage for all citizens in the next ten years. California, New Jersey, Massachusetts and others will experiment and figure out what works. Maybe all states will enact some form of catastrophic protection for their citizens. I, and others like me, do not want our hands held by a bureaucracy. I believe that going to doctors leads to unnecessary treatment. All of the single-payer systems use queuing to control access. My time is more valuable than standing in a queue. Twenty percent of the citizens spend eighty percent of the health car money. They might need socialistic hand-holding, since most of their problems result from poor life style choice. I am on Medicare and it really pisses me off that a third of Medicare is for the medical problems of Type 2 diabetics, a completely avoidable problem.