Happy B, Ms. E!  Have a delightful new year!

We need smaller schools and a better teacher to student ratio.  [Columbine was a very large high school; smaller schools have less violence.]  We need an assault weapon ban.  We need better funding for mental health care; well we need universal health care and that is part of it.  Remember the Columbine killers had been taking antidepressants, which has unpredictable effects on teens.

We need to better understand that the use of guns in our culture is barbaric  and in need of control.  Top down, we need to stop using death as an answer to a problem.  Get rid of the death penalty; stop bombing people.  Maybe then the teenagers will understand that when they get depressed it is not the best idea to buy or steal guns and plan a rampage.  Those video games that train children to kill to advance in the game give me the creeps. 

The divorce papers were filed on Good Friday.  I wonder if that was done coincidentally or informationally?  Anyone who both cheats on his wife and goes around declaring that she is going to hell is asking for trouble.

 [I don’t believe you made it up.  Gibson is too nutty all on his own.] 

Glad that link was helpful to you!  That wedding in 1928, dressed in black, how peculiar the priests were back then.  Still some priests would not have performed that wedding at all back then. 

My parents had a "mixed" marriage and my father left the Catholic church to marry my mother.  When they changed the rules a few decades later, my folks were miffed that these rules that had been so disruptive to them were so easily changed.   Anyway, there is no longer a requirement to raise the kids Catholic.  See http://www.usccb.org/laity/marriage/marriagefaqs.shtml  But individual priests could definitely have an attitude about the whole thing.  I know that my father was quite willing to leave the Church in part because one priest had given a sermon against "mixed"marriage all the while glaring at my great uncle who was married to a  [gasp!  the horror!]  Episcopalian.  

Sorry you had such a bad experience.  Nowadays they have programs to teach couples how to make the commitment work, or so I hear.  

Keep up.  The Vatican changed that decades ago.

What a scary story, but thank you for telling it!  My sister-in-law drove my brother to the hospital when he had a heart attack, and the cardiologist was furious.  He said that if there is any time for an ambulance, this is it, when someone is having a heart attack.  Luckily he survived, but I was sort of surprised at that. 

Now Martha, argue if you must, but don’t fight with someone’s icon/handle/image.  After all, you picked a handle from a posh island.  When you start to attack someone’s icon, it looks very much as though you have no real argument on the real issue in this thread.  And you don’t mean to suggest that, do you?

I thought some of the best insights into the financial crisis came on the Daily Show:  http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=224262&title=eliza…

I drove by one band of so-called protesters the other day waving their straight-from-talk-radio signs.  There were about a dozen of them.  My mind also lept to the tens of thousands I marched with in February 2003 in San Francisco and around the world to protest an invasion of Iraq.  See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_15,_2003_anti-war_protest  There are always going to be right wing loonies who will march in lockstep with their overpaid radio talkjock leaders.  But there are not really that many of them.   Liz Peek, I think, lives in a very small world with limited information about how the rest of the world is living.   I think of her weekly columns as an interesting peek into that world.   The funny thing is, why do the right wing tax worried folk never protest the cost of war and prison?   In a way it seems like they are trying to put public schools out of business with all their cries to stop taxation.  And in California, with Prop 13, they have very nearly succeeded. 

Now Bonnie.  Have you ever worked as a poll worker?  A couple years ago there was a big shortage of poll workers in our county so I volunteered.  It was very difficult work.  People would mess up ballots and get new ones.  Or they would mess up ballots and submit them anyway.  Elections can be messy things.   It boiled down to some absentee ballots that were not counted initially.

All of you who think this is a Democrat v. Republican issue are wrong.  This is about whether we respect the rule of law, the electoral process [which can and does get messy] and whether we are willing to abide by a result.  This sounds like a result.  The Senate should seat Franken immediately.  Coleman should really drop it.  Every time they do a recount, Franken ends up with more votes. 

Coleman is just trying to exhaust Franken’s resources so that he will have less money to run on for re-election.  It was a tight election, and the next one will likely be tighter.  If Coleman can keep Franken in the courts for another few months, he wins but not in any principled way.  

Sure Helen, let men have their say, but men who don’t even know the women in question have no business trying to limit their choices legally.  There are so many different things that can happen with a pregnancy and a woman’s health.   This is one reason why the Pope bugs me.  And I am not even Catholic. 

I believe the headline is in error.  Tony Perkins is not speaking to Pro-Choice activists.  He is speaking to anti-abortion activists, to anti-choice activists.

I am glad Captain Phillips is safe.  But I am sorry that his safety came at the price of the death of three desperate young men.  The failure of Somalia’s economy and government is leading to heartbreak. 

One of the many ironies of this situation was that the cargo carried by the Maersk Alabama was in large part aid from the United Nations to Kenya, Uganda and Somalia.