Free Republic

Anything to distract us from what's really serious. It's a clever nickname, but I forget which disgraced politician from the Northeast is supposed to be the "Luv Gov." Is it Eliot Spitzer, who resigned as New York's governor almost two weeks ago in the midst of scandal after he was linked to an alleged high-priced call girl ring? Is it his replacement, David Paterson, who spent his second day on the job confessing publicly to running around on his wife while saying that she'd been unfaithful, too? (Way to overshare, governor. And now he's giving interviews about the drugs he's...

Maybe the problem isn't that some people won't vote for a female presidential candidate. Maybe the problem is that the candidate is this particular woman, Hillary Clinton. That's what I think when I hear people complain about the role of sexism in the primaries. First whispered, then shouted, the allegations of sexism have caught hold online, at dinner parties and at family gatherings. Women have even been known to accuse other women of gender disloyalty for remaining cool toward Clinton. Granted, ever since she came to national attention in 1992, the country's conflicted feelings about women have been projected onto...

Slowly but surely, the political and emotional conversation about the issue of life has begun to shift from the realm of birth control to death control. But maybe the fundamental question remains the same: Who's in charge of our lives, anyway? It's the baby boomers' fault, of course: That generation, still largely concerned with aging cute and looking young, is only now beginning to comprehend what it means to grow old with dignity -- and to die with dignity. We like to kid ourselves that we'll be able to control what happens.