Oh, how I remember all those wonderful children I was going to have.

The perfect children who wouldn't talk back to me, ever have a bad attitude, fight with their siblings, the ones who wouldn't disobey.

Perhaps money can't buy love, but it can certainly purchase power. So as oil prices have been rising, the major oil-producing nations have been gaining clout.

You're watching the Olympics and finding yourself bedazzled by the feats of utterly dedicated, amazing athletes when a commercial intervenes, likewise promising a bedazzling feat, this one by a major U.S. corporation. It's the sort of thing that just could alter American lives for the better.

Almost out of nowhere, the once-ailing U.S. dollar has come storming back. That's good news on several fronts.

A stronger dollar will quell simmering domestic inflation, which last month reached a worrisome 5.6 percent over July a year ago, a 17-year high.

U.S. athletes, journalists, public officials and tourists attending the Summer Olympic Games in Beijing are at risk of Chinese hackers -- most likely with Chinese government approval -- infiltrating their laptops, Black Berrys and other electronic devices, security experts are warning.

In 34 years, a generation from now, America truly will be a melting pot. The Census Bureau estimates that minorities, currently one third of the U.S. population, will constitute just over half of the population by 2042.

One of the coolest things about the Olympics has been that the U.S. athletes do not all have the same last name and do not all look like one another. They boast an amazing array of ethnic and racial heritages.

The war in the Caucasus has been compared by some on the right to Germany's seizure of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia in 1938. Officials such as Vice President Dick Cheney and Sen. John McCain, the GOP presidential candidate, have argued for a forceful American response to the new crisis.

The FBI's mishandling of the anthrax case and its rush to claim it solved not only have made it doubtful the truth of the matter ever will come out, but it has turned this nightmare into a conspiracy freak's dream.

Five months in jail for driving Mr. bin Laden? Only in America!

Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's former chauffeur, recently won an appallingly light sentence for aiding al-Qaeda. Hamdan's apologists call him a hapless, innocent motorist. If so, anyone steering a bank-job getaway car is "just a driver."