You have to ask yourself, 'Who owns me? Do I own myself or am I just another piece of government property?'

Barring extreme physical and mental disabilities, each and every one of us is where we are today -- be it poor or wealthy, happy or sad, on the streets or in a condo, in a Mercedes or a rusted-out Pinto -- because of the choices we have made during our lives. It's the choices we have made that put us where we are, not the choices others have made for us.

I was your quintessential nerd in high school.

It is the rare - maybe even nonexistent - politician who will admit this, but number one on the politicians to-do list is always to get reelected. Nothing else comes close. The economy, the stock market, the war on terrorism ... NOTHING comes ahead of getting reelected. Staying in power is job number one.

You CAN NOT judge previous generations by today's standards. Today Mark Twain is called by many, a racist. By the standards of his time, he was a social liberal. Even Teddy Roosevelt was a social liberal at the time, but he accepted as fact that idea that Caucasians were inherently superior to all other races. That makes him a racist in the CORRECT definition of the term.

Yeah, I'm insensitive. So is life. DEAL with it.

People often get racism mixed up with bigotry or prejudice. We need to get our terminology straightened out. We obviously have racial problems that need solving. The first step in solving a problem is to identify it. If we keep mis-identifying bigotry and prejudice as racism we'll never make any headway