mothers do belong at home. At least until the little monsters are off in school. However, that's not the real issue. The real issue is never mentioned. Is your focus your family, or your career? If your focus is your career, you should skip the family (I apply this to both sexes) because you will shortchange both your spousal unit (note the gender neutrality) and your kids. If your focus is on your family, what the hell do you care weather you become CEO or not? At that point, your career is there to provide the roof and the food and the security.

Unfortunately, this regime in Washington has repeatedly demonstrated its contempt for the rule of law by repeatedly violating any number of laws. And... the Congress has demonstrated its utter irrelevance by virtue of its inability to even protest this lawlessness never mind compelling compliance with the laws.

So what would this law be? Just another one for them to ignore (see signing statements - Congress' inability to tell Shrub he doesn't have that authority).

won't be conducted in some dark, dank dungeon somewhere infested with spiders and rats.

Unfortunately, Mr. Blumenthal, you ask too much. This regime's transgressions, powered by cowardice, will not stop until they are removed from power. Thus they send out a representative to explain their behavior as they have no intention of changing it. Furthermore, they give this representative a traditional name like diplomat instead of the more accurate and descriptive name of Liar.

for probably two and a half decades. Who will introduce such an amendment in Congress where such changes originate?

And while we're at it, there's another change that needs to be made. Every state in which I've lived has a referendum process whereby the people (the real people) can impose changes to laws on the legislatures, weather they like it or not. This process has seen increasing use as people have seen state legislatures do things of which they don't approve. No such process exists in the Constitution and the Federal Government has an increasing mountain of laws and regulations that govern our lives. Yet this mountain is effectively beyond the control of the American people because the process required to change or remove them is so Byzantine as to make it immune from the will of the people.

its original name was the Department of War which is what it is. It is not the Department of Defense.

Any professional negotiator knows that you don't bring the principals into a negotiation until an agreement has been reached at a lower level. Be it a company president or a country president, they don't negotiate, they ratify what has been agreed to (unless, of course, they themselves are amateurs).

However, the important point is that all negotiations are a matter of give and take. So far all I've seen of the American position is all take and no give.

the government. They keep the populace cowed and frightened. They are more easily manipulated that way. So I don't fly anymore. It infuriates me to realize that to travel by air today in the US of A is little different than what we used to point at in horror in the 50s and 60s about the Soviet Union. So I just don't participate.

I don't have cable so I forget that there are people out there who can be as blunt as I about this bullshit. What's amazing to me is that Republican PC is even more disgusting than Democratic PC.

But as all three of my representatives are card carrying members of the Republican Lemming Group, it's not likely to have much impact.

It would seem that the grim reaper himself has taken his cues from our modern society and mechanized. If I consider what will surely be only a partial listing of the horrors of the last century, I find

Armenia - 1.5 million in the Ottoman's genocide.

Georgia/Ukraine - 10 - 20 million in Stalin's forced collectivization.

The Holocaust - 4.5 million Jews plus millions of non-Jewish Poles and Romney's

China's cultural revolution - Unknown millions of Chinese die

Uganda - Idi Amin slaughters 800-900,000 Ugandans for personal reasons

Cambodia - 2.5 million Cambodians die to further prove that ideology (religious or otherwise) is bad for good governance.

And I haven't even listed the horrors in Africa in Rwanda, Somalia, Ethiopia, the Sudan, and South Africa.

Can justice be brought to any of these victims? No, not really. The scope of these crimes is simply too large. There is no way to effectively call the perpetrators to account. The United States should be doing two things. First, we should not be supporting and allying ourselves with dictators. Our alliances with Batista, Samoza, Pinochet, the Shah, and Saddam Hussein (before we attacked him) just to name a few, do us no honor. Second, we should realize that we can't bring the dead back but we can try to effect a reconciliation to prevent festering resentments from igniting a new genocidal rampage. We have done neither to date.

This, by the way, is what pisses me off about the Jews. The Holocaust was neither the first, or the last, or even the worst of the genocides perpetrated in living memory but they have exhibited a vindictiveness and a cult of victimization that has no mate in any of the other genocides.

As opposed to what they say, I have concluded that Neo-Cons are cowards. Their bluster is a screen to hide the fact that they are afraid, very, very afraid. And that's sad.