Mr. Williams, I suspect that you are not yet retired. I certainly would not feel secure if I only had the median assets you describe, i.e. $232,000. The average cost of a year in a nursing home was already $74,000 for a private room in 2005. A semi-private room with a stranger cost $64,000. If a person lands in a nursing home, the average stay is 2.4 years, which adds up to about $178,000. If a person has the misfortune to linger much longer, he will be on Medicaid. Notice that any medical emergencies also have to be paid for. It is easy to forget that retired people often have little control over their expenditures. Less and less of their income goes for discretionary purchases. More and more goes for necessities. These...

Diana you must be mighty young! Don't you know that most American women opposed the Women's Liberation movement during its first few decades? As to women in Congress and legislatures, many of them were also "proxies for conservative men." This includes wives who ran for their deceased husbands' seats. Don't forget also that married women in the southern states usually could not own property in their own name just a few decades ago! The U.S. has successfully carried out projects like those in Iraq and Afghanistan in the past. They just take time and patience, both of which we as Americans often have in short supply. Japan had no experience with democracy prior to the U.S. occupation. South Korea was an agrarian dictatorship at...

Chapman's attribution of a purported constitutional right to anonymity in public to the founding fathers is bizarre! They didn't even provide for a secret ballot, nor did most of the states until well after the Civil War! Most colonials lived in such small settlements that no one was a stranger. If a stranger appeared, he was treated with conspicuous suspicion until a local vouched for him personally. That was even true in towns. After all, Philadelphia, the largest, only had 30,000 people. Boston had about 16,000 plus British troops. The recently much-touted "right to privacy" derives from populist paranoia with regards to any big and anonymous institution. It first appeared in response to the early corporations of the late...