Handouts

"Here's my card." That's one of the most common three-word phrases in business - right up there with "Let's do lunch" and "I'm laid off." Even in this electronic era, the business card endures. In fact, it has evolved. There are virtual cards that can travel with e-mail messages and optical cards that can hold megabytes of data. Hand-held computer users routinely beam contact information to each other using infrared links. And a clever scanner and its accompanying Internet service have brought conventional cards into the digital age. The virtual business card is made possible by an Internet standard called vCard.

Two of the more memorable observations to come out of Mitt Romney during the first presidential debate had to do with fibs and Big Bird. The candidate said that as the father of sons, he knows that repeating a lie doesn't make it true. As to the latter? Look out, "Sesame Street," your days as a "victim" on the federal dole are numbered. The two seemingly unrelated remarks are worth mentioning because they intersect in Mr. Romney's tax and budget plans which, even by the most generous of interpretations, don't add up. If President Barack Obama failed in the debate, it was in not making that point strongly enough.

Fresh from playing basketball after college in Peru, Jon Brick started his career - getting in on the ground floor at one of Mom and Dad's gyms, working for his big sister, Vicki. The scions of the Brick Bodies enterprise were adults now. They had sparred at younger ages, but they had grown up. They could run a club, teach classes, supervise trainers, recruit members, maintain facilities in perfect harmony, right? No, not easily. Over four months of (trying to) work together, Type-A Vicki rode him hard - harder than the other employees, it seemed to Jon. Used to calling the shots as an executive officer at the Citadel, Jon was resentful.

Farm subsidies could finally be on the chopping block. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack recently acknowledged that corn and ethanol "subsidies need to be phased out" over time. And on a swing through Iowa, Mr. Vilsack suggested that the Obama administration will support some cuts in next year's budget. On the right, Sen. Richard Lugar, Republican of Indiana, has called for an end to sugar subsidies, and the budget plan from Republican Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin would reduce agricultural handouts - which often go to large corporate farmers - by $30 billion over 10 years.

WESTMINSTER -- School bus contractors, drivers and other members of Carroll's pupil transportation personnel department were at Cranberry Mall Saturday for the Transportation Fair.Bus drivers demonstrated flashing warning lights and the crossing control arm.In addition, Buster the Bus -- a robotic bus given to the Carroll school system by the Maryland Department of Education -- meandered through the parking lot and mall answering questions about bus safety.Children received handouts and coloring books.

Poverty is caused by a number of issues, primary among them unemployment or low-wage employment - not laziness or lack of personal responsibility. Far from it. Those exist, but it's safe to say the "working poor" work long hours often at two or more jobs for subsistence-level compensation. Because of their income, or lack of it, the poor cannot afford health care, making them more susceptible to disease and less likely to work full or part-time. The remedy is not welfare hand-outs of the past, meager and demeaning as they are, or welfare reform, which does nothing to ensure a living wage for newly hired workers.

A Howard County writer, who asks for anonymity for obvious reasons, writes: My home sits very near the borders of the Clarksville and Middle Patuxent environmental areas. We have seen an increasing number of foxes the past few years - at first while walking the trails and now just about everywhere in the neighborhood. The neighbors behind me started setting out food on a tree stump about four years ago, which attracted a fox around the same time every evening. My wife and I have a small dog, and we became concerned about its safety.

In voicing support for the Maryland Dream Act, UMBC's president Freeman Hrabowski isn't "dabbling in partisan politics" as letter writer James G. Howes claims ("UMBC has excess cash to subsidize illegal immigrants?" July 22). Mr. Hrabowski is voicing a reasoned opinion based upon decades of experience as a higher-education professional. As we attempt to rebound from a faltering economy, it is shortsighted and irresponsible to allow talent to languish in an attempt to score ideological points or punish the actions of parents who entered the country illegally.

The invoices are trickling into City Hall for former Mayor Sheila Dixon. The latest is that the city was billed by her hair stylist. What's next? Starbucks bills? Athletic center invoices? As we attempt to distance ourselves from our former mayor, the reminders continue to prove that she obviously put herself into a position of self-serving greed while city children went without food and homeless citizens combed the street corners for handouts. Does Ms. Dixon feel any guilt?

Gerald Otten and others appear to have forgotten the history of the Middle East ("The United Nations created a Jewish state; it can also create a Palestinian one," May 31). The United Nations did act on Palestinian statehood in 1947; two states were created by the declaration. However, the so-called Palestinians rejected their statehood by attacking the Jewish state alongside the surrounding Arab states, and afterward by choosing to live on UN handouts in refugee camps instead of creating their own state in the territories they possessed.