Karleen, you are again right on. Years ago I had a patient with a strange ‘birthmark’ in her right inguinal space. It was large and distorted. I had 2 other nurses help me distinguish this when we pulled back her large abdominal apron and much to our surprize it wasn’t a birthmark at all. It was Felix the Cat. Unfortunately tats do get better looking or ‘sexier’ with age.

LW2: You sound like an attention whore. If your letter is any indication of your personality I wouldn’t want you in my wedding either. Bet you wear white to the wedding !!!!!!!!!!!!

LW1: Your cousin may just be a babysitter. In that case you’re barking up the wrong tree. I worked in corrections and saw many women get pregnant that I wouldn’t let babysit my dog. Your concerns are legitimate but you have to do some investigating before the authorities would get involved. Good Luck.

Mr. Sorkin is right on……….Rewarding failure. Who benefits from this? Not hard working/ tax paying Americans that’s for sure.  The other point he brought up is "fences". We as Americans have a voice and that voice should be raised up in a non-partisan manner that we aren’t going to take it anymore !! I have also wondered how this is going to play into the concept of a one world currency, you know the New World Order. These ‘money-men’ with their elite club of only 30 such members have too much power. That GWB didn’t understand the scope of this is understandable. I don’t applaud him for much but I will applaud him that he admitted that this was over his head and handed the responsibility to someone who did understand and tried to make a difference.

The one thing I never understood is how AIG took all that bail-out money and then sent their executives on some lavish trip and nothing was done about it. I read somewhere that AIG is partly owned by the Saudi’s. Can anyone tell me if THAT is true?  I also don’t get the concept of bonuses. You are paid for doing your job, why do you get bonuses on top of that? I don’t get a bonus check for every life I save in my profession.  EMT’s don’t get bonuses, neither do firemen or policemen or our men and women in the armed forces who protect our country. What the banks have successfully done is to take taxpayer money, deny loans, raise credit card interest rates to loan-sharking levels and put middle class America in the perpetual poor-house.  But that’s been the master plan all along and we all bought into it. I am not by any means a financial wizard, I work and pay my bills. I can balance a checkbook. But I’m not stupid and I know when I’ve been screwed. This raping of America has to be stopped.

LW2: Get your mom to a doctor and have her hormone and thyroid levels checked. It sounds like menopause.

Thanks to everyone for their posts. There are so many things that have gone wrong for our country and it didn’t start in the past 10, 20 or 30 years. It had been cumulative for years. I was having a conversation with my brother the other day and we were discussing when you could take credit on your taxes for auto loans and credit cards for the interest you paid. Then it was gone. Credit card companies have now become legal loan sharks where at any given time they can raise your interest rate. Add into that a day late payment and now you have late charges.  Then the housing bubble and no downpayment loans. Then amazingly the bankruptcy laws changed. Then the jobs disappeared. Now the utilities are being raised and gas prices are going up again.  Everywhere we turn we are getting screwed by someone somehow. I don’t know about the rest of you but I for one make more money now than I ever have and am poorer than I’ve ever been. I am tired of working my ass off and paying for people who do not contribute to our society. My fix for unemployment would be that every product sold in this country had to have some component of that product made in this country. I don’t care if it’s a label or a pop-top. It would create jobs for people who do not have degrees but want to work. If you can’t make it on what you earn but are working then I would be happy to share my tax dollars with you. I don’t know what the answers are but we have to do something to get our country moving in the right direction again. The one thing I do know is that anyone who has a law degree, Republican or Democrat is not ever getting my vote again.

LW1: I agree with Karleen. I said the same thing to my ex when he made then insisted on the suggestion. He never brought it up again.

LW2: No one gets in my car without being belted in. The excuse that an air-bag will save you is pure rubbish. I’ve had more than one unbelted air-bag dead on arrival patient. Air-bags when deployed are very powerful and can push open the car door thus projecting you out onto the payment where your head does not survive the impact. My car has an alarm that if someone unbelts while I’m driving it goes off. Excellent safety feature !