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Dear Annie: My office is a horrible place to work. My bosses are impossible and have no compassion for any of their employees. I have been told to stop having an asthma attack and get back on the phones. We have to ask permission to use the restroom and write down the time we leave and return. I have a doctor's note saying that I need to use the restroom frequently and was told too bad, get adult diapers. Yesterday, my manager hung up on me because I didn't respond to an e-mail she had sent after I left the...

DEAR ABBY: I am a teenage girl with an obese mother. She doesn't exercise much. She started going to the gym about a month ago, but since has stopped. She's what you'd call a habitual snacker. At night she'll finish eating one unhealthy food and then begin eating another. (She often eats more than 1,500 calories in one of her nightly "snacks.") To make matters worse, she eats in front of the TV and makes me fetch her food rather than walking to the kitchen herself. When I try to talk to her about her bad habits, she gets defensive...

Dear Annie: I recently reconnected with someone I had not seen in over three years. "Bev" is a friend of my sister's and someone whom I find very attractive. She also is a genuinely nice person, and I know that she thinks highly of me as well. I would love to ask her out, but she has a boyfriend. Bev's friends and family do not like this guy. Three months ago, when the boyfriend moved 3,000 miles away, everyone expected them to break up, but it hasn't happened. I value Bev's friendship and would like it to be more, but...

Dear Annie: My parents divorced 13 years ago when I was 32. I haven't spoken to my mother for the past eight years, because she is a very angry person, and every conversation we had ended up with her hurting me. Since I could not get her to stop, I had to quit talking to her. My problem now is my dad, who never caused me a minute of trouble until three weeks ago. That's when he began dating for the first time since the divorce. I don't mind that he's seeing other women. The difficulty is that the person...

DEAR ABBY: While vacationing at a resort last month, I ran into the brother of a girl I went to school with. I hadn't seen "Sean" or his sister "Meghan" for several years, so I asked how he was doing, and then proceeded to ask about Meghan. His face turned pale and he said, "She's dead." I had never heard that Meghan has passed away. I was mortified. I had no idea what to do next. I mumbled a clumsy "I'm sorry," and he continued to give me a withering stare. I have since learned that his sister died of...

Dear Annie: I am in my late 20s and have been happily married for over five years. Here is the problem: My parents divorced when I was little, and my father is an alcoholic. Ever since I can remember, he would call me on the phone, drunk and rambling so much that by the end of the call, I would be in tears. The past couple of years he's gotten worse. He is verbally abusive, calling me names and telling me how stupid I am, but in the same breath, crying that I am the only thing in his life....

DEAR ABBY: I work at a large zoo, in the children's zoo department. I cannot count the number of times I have heard parents, out of ignorance or impatience, lie to their child about the animals they are observing. In an enclosure with several species of animal, for example, they will tell their child that pygmy species (smaller than non-pygmy when full-grown) are actually babies of large animals. I have also seen them give incorrect information about animal behavior, diet and habitat. I want to ask these parents for something: Respect your child enough to admit that you sometimes don't...

Last month, President Bush nominated Dr. Ben S. Bernanke, currently chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors, as chairman of Federal Reserve Board to replace the retiring Alan Greenspan. Alan Greenspan's replacement comes at a time of heightened fears of inflation resulting from the recent spike in oil prices. First, let's decide what is and what is not inflation. One price or several prices rising is not inflation. When there's a general increase in prices, or alternatively, a reduction in the purchasing power of money, there's inflation. But just as in the case of diseases, describing a symptom doesn't...

During the hearings yesterday, Senator Coburn, who had been working on a cross word puzzle, made a statement, then proceeded to start crying.Does anyone know why this happened?Senator Coburn is probably the most reliable and solid conservative in the senate not to mention the toughest conservative one will find anywhere, did something happpen to him personally?

HOUSTON, Sept. 9 - Republican leaders in Congress and some White House officials see opportunities in Hurricane Katrina to advance longstanding conservative goals like giving students vouchers to pay for private schools, paying churches to help with temporary housing and scaling back business regulation.

I'm known to write occasionally that the rest of America doesn't understand the South. Now comes some clear and convincing evidence. As fate would have it, InsiderAdvantage, the company that I lead, just this week purchased the long-established Washington, D.C.-based Southern Political Report. Hastings Wyman, a widely respected political reporter in Washington, will continue to edit the publication. But as Hurricane Katrina approached, we were in the last stages of creating a daily web-based version of the report. Immediately, we called on all the resources of the Southern Political Report, including its vast network of contacts, many of whom live...

WASHINGTON -- Jude Wanniski might have been called the most important journalist of his time, except that the former reporter and editorial writer was never really a journalist. He was an advocate who changed the world. He fathered supply-side economics, which became the doctrine of the Republican Party and enabled it to be the nation's ruling party most of the last half-century. When Wanniski died of a heart attack Monday, he was at the low point of his political influence. The doors of the mighty that opened for him in the '70s and '80s long had been closed. In an...

Syrian President Bashar Assad discusses initial stabs at democracy in his country, the outlook for peace in the Middle East and Syria's withdrawal from Lebanon. And in an answer aimed at Washington, he says neither Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo nor Iraq are models for democracy. SPIEGEL: Mr. President, there are tentative movements toward democracy here and there in the Arab world. But there is little evidence of that in Syria. Why not? Assad: Well, it just happens that the Arab states develop at different rates and under different historical conditions. Egypt, for example, has not experienced as many coups as Syria....

WASHINGTON -- Mired in August's dog days, the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) last week released a four-page opposition research paper on Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York. The female Democratic senator deserving greater scrutiny, however, was Debbie Stabenow of Michigan. A vulnerable Stabenow appears headed for a second term, pointing to broad Republican failure. The hard truth is that the NRSC's 2006 recruitment under Sen. Elizabeth Dole's chairmanship has mostly failed. The remote possibility of Rudy Giuliani running was the only conceivable threat to Clinton. Stabenow offered a more realistic target, but recruitment of a viable challenger fell...

On a sweltering June afternoon, Eric Cantor was making his way on foot through Pouncey Tract Park in Henrico County and the track at Short Pump Middle School. And not a bead of sweat appeared on his forehead or the back of his oxford cloth shirt. Perhaps that is appropriate for a man who, on a regular basis, finds himself in the company of the president of the United States, discussing the issues of the day. "It never ceases to amaze me that I'm in those meetings," Cantor said. "Sometimes, they are very intimate, not a lot of people are...

Introduction The House of Representatives will soon consider a major package of health care bills. The package, if enacted, would significantly improve the functioning of America’s health insurance markets and establish a solid foundation for further transformation of America’s health care system. Americans are deeply concerned about rising health care costs and the rising number of Americans who do not have health insurance, have trouble keeping it, or are unable to find affordable health care. Policymakers at the federal and state levels are concerned about how to make existing health insurance markets work better and reduce barriers to access to...

In economics, bad metaphors often lead to bad policies. As I explained years ago in The American Spectator: "Inflation is never a thermal condition described by 'overheating,' nor a budgetary consequence of 'guns and butter.' Monetary policy is never in the position of 'pushing on a string,' and government borrowing never 'primes the pump' or 'kick starts' entrepreneurial spirits. Booms need not lead to busts (Hong Kong boomed continuously from 1975 to 1997), and busts need not be preceded by booms (witness the United States in 1937). Most important, large increases in asset prices are never inexplicable 'bubbles' that collapse...

The Bush Administration is rejoicing in what it says is a dramatic drop in the federal deficit, from $412 billion in 2004, to $333 billion in the current fiscal year. The reason, says the administration, is a larger than expected jump in tax revenue. Sen. Jim DeMint, South Carolina Republican, believes the administration's numbers are "misleading," because "Congress is raiding Social Security to mask the true size of the deficit." Still, the deficit appears to be declining for the first time since the end of the Clinton Administration, the onset of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and costs associated...

What San Diego-based start-up SeaCode Inc. plans to do is nothing if not novel: anchor a cruise ship three miles off the coast of Los Angeles, fill it with up to 600 programmers from around the world, eliminate visa restrictions and make it easy for customers to visit the site via water taxi. The two men behind the venture -- Roger Green, who describes himself as an IT and outsourcing veteran, and IT consultant David Cook, whose job history includes a stint as a ship captain -- recently discussed their plan in an interview with Computerworld. Roger Green of SeaCode...

For awhile, it was okay, but now its gotten way to out of hand.This whole Hillary Clinton "super power" myth is starting to turn normal rational folks into thinking she is some kind of mythical beast with supernatural powers of mind control.She is, simply put, a hyper ambitious leftist with a horrible agenda, but she is no super villian genius who is unstoppable.Every time she walks out the door to get breakfast, we have to see a story about how this is a political ploy to get voters.Half of this country hates her, the other half is sick and tired...