I should start by saying that I'm a 56 year old male who has 6 grown daughters (yes, I committed heinous crimes in a previous life), two of which have "lampreys" of their own.

When my first daughter was born I thought it was going to be the end of the world. The last thing I wanted was a kid. Fortunately for mankind, evolution has pre-wired us to get sucked into our offspring after we have them. Usually, I think, the ones who want them the least tend to be the ones to get sucked in the most.

Next you will spend years and years confronting situations for which you are unprepared (no matter how much you've tried) and to which you don't know the answers. Don't worry. There rarely are single or even necessarily correct answers. That's why being a parent is described as the last bastion of the amateur. So skip being uptight now and avoid the June rush. You're going to screw up. Your kids will be fine if you remain focused on two things: giving them enough freedom to learn things on their own and realizing that you are their teacher. What they learn about living they will learn from you. Personally, I made sure my girls could cook (their mother couldn't), manage money, and do car repair.

Your life will change forever. It's called being human.

You can always say that you can't remember, you can't recall, you can stonewall them.

Ah, Mr. Sullivan, you sound so much like other so-called "former" neo-cons. You beat your breast about Iraq not because the unjustified, violation-of-the-spirit, concept, and letter of the UN Charter attack on Iraq but because it was a poorly executed attack. If Shrub, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al. had been competent, then attacking Iraq would have been OK. It never occurs to you that it is no more OK to impose your opinion on somebody else's government than it is for a Christian fundamentalist to impose Christianity on a Jew.

Latter day imperialists, like yourself, will eventually inflict on American society the end game woes of imperialism. Ask Britain about the IRA - a direct consequence of their early imperialism in Ireland or some of the consequences of colonization the Middle East or India. Ask the French about Algeria or Indo-China. Ask Belgium about the Congo. Indeed, I would argue that 9/11 was the consequence of America's colonization-by-surrogate in the Middle East.

Why would we want to do this to ourselves? I don't know but I have been complaining about the piss poor quality of the history education in this country.

Shrub and his votaries have all but swept away the last remnents of the old republic. With the loss of habeas corpus for terror suspects, you're just a definition away from being an enemy combatant. How many racketeers have been prosecuted under RICO? Only a handful, if any. Mostly it's just people whose activities can be fitted into the definition of racketeering in the law. It's not like it's being used on people like the Gotti's.

Everybody seems to be focused on the symptoms and not the cause. The reality is that the United States has become arrogant, imperial, and repressive. What the Democrats have to do is not merely truncate this illegal war in Iraq, they must change the mindset that allowed it to happen in the first place. Every time I hear the phrase "regime change", I ask myself: "Who died and made us God? How would we like it if some other country (say China) decided that they wanted to see "regime change" here in Washington? How would we like it?" Whenever I hear of legislation that seeks to deny, marginalize, or restrict a variety of things that would nominally be described as personal choice (like gay marriage), I ask myself who died and gave the government the right to peer into my private life and tell me what to do? I've long been under the (mis)impression that the United States government was restricted to controlling public life, not private life. I am strongly reminded of a comment my wife passed on to me from when she had been in Eastern Europe (or, as she would have it, Central Europe). "Oh, you Americans think that freedom is the freedom to travel, you think that if you can get in your car and drive somewhere, you are free. There's more to it than that."

Ending the zit on American honor called the Iraq war is only a begining.

Reality, of course, tells us that the real seducers are these Daughters of Eve. These young women sashay their way through God's world in their mini-skirts, low cut and see through blouses and tight pants. They wear these clothes to flaunt their curvaceous bodies for the eyes and attentions of men.

Having said that. Remember, Virginia, YOU are responsible for your actions. Always. Not somebody else.

There are generally two different things to consider when you're talking about doing something. One is what exactly are you trying to do, and the other is how are you going to do it. It's fairly clear that Shurb will make some cosmetic changes to how we are going about the process of creating the success story - "And success is a country that governs, defends itself, that is a free society, that serves as an ally in this war on terror."

In other words, essentially the same crap he's been saying since he started this misbegotten war. He seems not to have understood that isn't in his approaches, it's in his goals.