My heart breaks for this poor girl. Oh, not the tragically shallow 20-something who wrote the letter but the 16 year old. Except for her luxurious surroundings, she might as well have spent her brief life being raised by wolves in the wild. Even the ever-loving nanny sounds incompetent and inadequate or the poor girl would have been taught some basic life skills like personal hygiene or professionally evaluated if she's incapable of learning those skills.

There appears to be at least one grandmother in the picture. I don't hear any mention of her stepping up the plate so we have to assume this family has been dysfunctional for generations.

Just another argument for making the requirements for becoming a parent at least as stringent as those for adopting a poodle.

If only we could be truly free of this right-wing sock puppet and his masters in another five days. Between the stink bombs his administration has hidden here and there in the last three months and the damage they've inflicted on us over the past eight years, it will be half a century before we recover.

The Bush White House wasn't so much tech-challenged as communication-averse. If your primary objective is to keep as much inside information in and outside information out as humanly possible, what's the point of a state of the art communication system? Hermetically sealed rooms by definition have no windows. (An unintentional pun, I see upon re-reading.)

I worked for a Texas oil and gas company in the middle 80's, not a particularly pleasant place to be. In the end, the company managed to pull through with minimum layoffs and generally humane treatment of its employees and is doing well now.

But there were a few goofs along the way. Supplies were so severely restricted that the offices of departing employees were stripped to the bones like dead cattle in the desert. The tiny salary increases were paid out in the form of stock grants. WE HAD TO START SIGNING A FORM TO GET ASPIRIN AND BANDAIDS FROM THE FIRST AID KITS.

But at the same time, the fleet of corporate jets flew proudly. The country club memberships for top management continued. The $170K a year deer hunting leases were sacrosanct.

These were picayune costs in the overall schema of things. But they made a bad situation worse. And when we got a headache thinking about them, we had to requisition an aspirin!

One tragedy of the Jack Abramoff kerfuffle is that Grover Norquist didn't score big enough bucks to retire once and for all to some tax-free island in the Caribbean. While it would have been unfair in the larger scheme of things for a weasel of Norquist's stature to profit from money laundering, it would have spared us his presence now. The injustice would have been subsumed by the greater good.

When we have out of town guests here in Denver, we almost always take them to see the Red Rocks Amphitheater. It's a magnificent outdoor music and drama venue carved from a mountainside.

I've driven many times along the Blue Ridge Parkway through the Shenandoah Mountains.

I used to live in San Antonio, where the River Walk is probably the city's most popular and famous attractions.

Lots of my relatives in the Southeast power their homes with electricity from the Tennessee Valley Authority.

The horror, the horror! These were all created or completed with public money during the Great Depression. Thank goodness we no longer fritter our tax dollars away on public spending in this reckless and irresponsible fashion. In fact we don't even fill in our potholes, repair our bridges or upgrade our dilapidated airports.

As America looks more and more like 1954 East Berlin, we can congratulate ourselves on our thrift and prudence. Until, I suppose, the Dust Bowl starts creeping up on the greens at the Chevy Chase Country Club.

My goodness mercy me, some folks have obviously had some unfortunate blind dates indeed. Unless Curtis is setting his friends up with Ted Bundy or Ann Coulter, it seems more likely he just wants them to be as happy as he is himself. And he is, as noted in another letter, actually thinking about someone other than himself. That's a nice change of pace in itself.

The message (once again) to any intelligent citizens still residing in North Dakota: "Get out if you can." If you're a young college student, grab your degree and run for the border. If you're older and trapped in your $15,000 home that you can't sell and in any event couldn't afford to replace elsewhere, then I'm sorry for you but wonder why you didn't get out decades ago.

What else do you expect from these folks? They have no real answers to actual real-life problems, a large number of which they themselves caused. If they're going to keep their pudgy white male faces in front of a camera and keep the money rolling in, they have to scream about SOMETHING!!

They remind me of the old joke about the couple who were perfect for each other: He was sick and she was a pill.

I wish I could remember the title of the book I read, at least 15 years ago, about the dubious prospects of General Motors. It recounted several efforts by GM management to get back on track, one of which was a starry-eyed belief in the promise of better technology and factory automation. Out of that venture came such entertaining sights as windshield installation machines that went rogue and began methodically shattering instead of installing. Then there were the painting robots that occasionally turned sideways and began painting each other.

Faith is whatever brand of hocus-pocus is currently endorsed by the current ruling majority. Superstition is everything else.