Gov. Crist, run as an Independent as Joe Lieberman did. If your fellow Republicans challenge you in the primary, why would you remain a Republican? Fie on their endless conservative litmus tests.

A good friend of mine's husband is dying of an aggressive form of prostate cancer. Obesity is a risk factor, but he wasn't that heavy, or at least, he's very tall, so he carried his weight well. Now he's very obese, partly as a result of having to take the female hormone estrogen to slow down his cancer. The only friends I have who died recently or are dying did not get checked for cancer, even though the woman had already had breast cancer, and now it's too late. My friend's husband's diagnosis is terminal.

I wish there were clinical human trials with antibody 77, which has been shown to stop prostate cancer in its tracks in animal studies.

Jennifer,

I usually like your stuff, but on the subject of race and class on the "southeast side," you have way too much confidence in academics to intelligently and reasonably moderate such a discussion. I am fully expecting to show up, have reality turned on its head by academics who don't live on the southeast side, and be taught how to speak "correctly" about what's happening to Iowa City and our crime rate, as well as depressed property values.

How many special-needs adults and children do you think a town the size of Iowa City can reasonably be expected to absorb? Our schools never used to be in need of assistance. We never used to have guns fired into residences on the southeast side. Just how are we supposed to feel about this?

Lori Cardella has a right to request a special election. She got the legally requisite number of signatures on her petition, and she has a right to run. I don't plan on supporting her, but I defend her right to assert herself and get on the ballot to run.

I was at the Iowa City Council candidate forum sponsored by the Iowa City Press-Citizen and Sue Freeman and the Neighborhood Centers of Johnson County at Grant Wood School, and I noticed that Connie Champion, who voted to defer the second reading of the curfew vote so that "a group of people" could try to solve the problem of an increase in crime on the southeast side of Iowa City can try to solve those problems without giving police tools to send children and teens roaming the streets all night. Right now a nine-year-old child can hang with teenagers on the street at 1:00 a.m., and the police have no authority to send the child home.

Connie said that the SE side crime problem "has become a 'racial issue,' which is tragic." She said that she lives in a "mixed neighborhood, which is good for families" on Summit Street, a high-end historical district where someone living a plantation-style mansion next to other historical mansions simply can't compare the advantages, which I'm sure are real, of her mixed neighborhood to the hell on earth experienced by residents in the SE side's mixed neighborhood.

Mark McCallum denied that complaints about crime where people live is based on race. "People can't sleep at night," he said simply. He wants the city to get out of the low-income housing business supervised (actually, poorly supervised) by the City of Iowa City Housing Authority.

I used to work with homeless families in transitional housing and Head Start parents on the SE side south of Highway 6, and the outcome statistics for those families not from foreign countries were dismal. Only my clients from Ecuador, Egypt, the Sudan, and Nigeria qualified for home loans, small business loans, graduate school fellowships, and had kids getting good grades at and regularly attending schools in Iowa City.

Disgustingly typical sex-negative, homophobic evangelical behavior. Nail that church to the wall!!!

Great find! My grandfather, George Carrington Mason, was a botanist, museum curator, and naval architect in Virginia, and he would have been thrilled, as am I.

Sen. Levin is correct. We need an independent special prosecutor and independent investigators. AG Eric Holder is a weasel and obeys presidential orders to evade, obfuscate, permit, suppress evidence. Holder is a politically animated non-solution, as is Pres. Obama.

IMVHO, Bill Maher is a misogynistic "progressive" leftist whose time has come and gone. It's guys like him, drinking the Kool-Aid, making sexist jokes about Hillary Clinton and other women in politics, regardless of their agenda, that made me leave the Dimocratic Party. I'm an Independent now. I'm sick of both polarized extremes, both cults of a rigid ideology, the left wing and the right wing, and long for a centrist third party.

If Senator (?) Al Franken of Minnesota were less like Bill Maher, he would have been elected by a clearer majority. It's those rape jokes, Al. Both Bill Maher and Al Franken are too full of themselves and no longer funny to women like me.