Heck of a rant on abortion: "If I ... shoot me"
After this I didn't need an afternoon nap. Thank you, Katha Pollitt, writing in the Nov. 30 issue of The Nation! Still, as a man, I'm concerned at the list of routine man things that she finds comparable to abortion. Well, it is a rant.Reminds me of the lead essay by Jeffrey Toobin in the Nov. 23 New Yorker, which opens with news that when our Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution, why, abortion was "legal and commonplace." Take that, you originalists who want to go back to the early days of the Republic.

Too much
I made the mistake of clicking on the Flickr link to the White House photostream. Too much. On p. 2 we learn that the Oval Office has a deputy director of operations. He's shown holding the door open for the president. Too much.

Keep guns from terror suspects: A petition to sign
In the Issues Committee of our county Democratic Party we're proposing measures to keep assault weapons off our streets. I'm all for it. So I was pleased to see in my email inbox this petition drive on another aspect of the gun craziness that afflicts our country. Check out the petition at http://www.closetheterrorgap.org/. I'd say it makes sense. The terrible slaughter at Fort Hood, as we're coming to see, was foretold repeatedly. And the suspect was a suspect before he got fully armed. How is this possible?Further thoughts on this very disturbing event:I don't see the Fort Hood shooter as a deranged madm

Miami bloggers, some anonymously, get together
We weren't all there. One of the best of the Miami bloggers, South Florida Daily Blog, declared himself a family man with other obligations on Saturday afternoon, and was absent. Somehow his family obligations apparently included a tremendous amount of work putting up videos on Glenn Beck's crazy appearance in Central Florida. Well, that was up on Sunday. Anyway, otherwise it was a diverse, chatty, sometimes shy group that came together in a blogup that hadn't happened for a couple years.Who was shy? One was

FL-18 Ros-Lehtinen: Saving the Atlantic and its fisheries is “unacceptable”
Talk about short-sighted. And this is my member of Congress, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-FL-18. As always, except for her very reluctant vote in favor of expanding children’s health insurance after numerous votes against it, she is on the wrong side of an issue. O woe, she bleats in the US House. If they impose these rules limiting fishing for grouper, her constituent in the Florida Keys will have to give up his charter fishing business. Exactly. Her constituent has been over-fishing since he was able to start an outboard motor, and it’s got to stop.I don’t see that this foolishness has made it into the Miami Herald, so thanks to