In a perfect world, we wouldn't have to teach our 12- and 13-year-olds about condoms. In a perfect world, we'd also eat five servings of fruits and vegetables a day, exercise six times a week, purchase only what we could afford, go to a good college, marry wisely and stay married for life. We could do away with beta-blockers and statins, debt counselors and divorce lawyers. Fast-food joints would go out of business, which would be just as well because everyone would be overqualified to work there.

Less than a decade ago, the people of Chicago and its suburbs were served by 52 separate United Ways. Today, the region has but one. Gone is the need for multiple offices, forms, accounting systems, rules, directors and other examples of needless duplication. The result: More of the money donated to what became the United Way of Metropolitan Chicago actually goes to serve people in need.

New Hampshire is wasting huge sums of money and squandering the potential to contribute to society of the majority of those who serve time for a crime. The governor and Legislature know that millions of dollars per year could be saved by spending on programs that reduce the state's shockingly high prison recidivism rate. Their predecessors knew it. So did current and former corrections commissioners and others who work with inmates.

It's hard to blame Sen. Judd Gregg for getting testy about deficit spending. The national debt now tops $12 trillion and threatens to mortgage the future of coming generations. So Gregg's on-camera explosion at Budget Director Peter Orzag during a Senate Budget Committee hearing on President Obama's jobs proposal this week was surprising only in its intensity.

When it happens on The Simpsons, it's funny. Viewers expect Montgomery Burns, the villainous owner of the nuclear power plant that employs Homer Simpson, to lie. When it happens in real life, no one smiles. People the expect honesty from the operators of the nation's nuclear power plants. So the Entergy vice president who recently told regulators and the public that the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant had no underground pipes capable of leaking tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen, was being either deliberately misleading or frighteningly ignorant about the workings of his power plant.

The words of New Hampshire Supreme Court Chief Justice John Broderick should be cast in bronze and hung in every town and city hall and posted in every government agency.

Across the nation, municipalities face another year of higher costs and lower revenues. So they're looking for new sources of cash. Recently, a Concord committee created to look for greater efficiency in the operation of the departments of parks, recreation and general services trotted out an old idea: getting corporate sponsorship for the city's seven swimming pools.

If you were the superstitious sort, it would be easy to believe that the weather gods had flown into a rage last week following the news that Mount Washington no longer holds the record for the fastest wind recorded on earth. It certainly seemed apropos that fierce gusts and frigid air would visit New Hampshire just days after the state had to relinquish the distinction to a little island in Australia, where a 253 mph gust was recorded by a remote weather station during Tropical Cyclone Olivia in 1996. The loss is sad and a little galling.

Last week, five justices on the U.S. Supreme Court undid a century of tradition and precedent governing corporate limits on campaign spending. It could take a few election cycles for the impact of the court's ruling to be known. But maybe not. Politics are as partisan today as they've ever been, and the Obama administration has placed big, contentious issues on the table.

For half a century, J.D. Salinger was New Hampshire's most famous resident. But in keeping with the oddity that was the man and his life, relatively few people knew he lived here, and few of those who did knew exactly where. Salinger's neighbors in Cornish made a game of making it hard for fans, journalists and paparazzi to locate the reclusive author. It was "one of the most enjoyable municipal conspiracies ever; how to keep everyone guessing where Jerry Salinger lived," former state senator Peter Burling, a neighbor of Salinger's, told the Valley News.

President Obama was right to focus his first State of the Union address on the need to rebuild the economy so it can once again provide jobs. But the president failed to use his prime-time opportunity to point out that healthy businesses, a strong economy and a low unemployment rate can't occur unless health care costs are controlled.

It's almost impossible to watch television without seeing an anti-health care reform ad paid for, at least ostensibly, by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. You've seen them: the big red exploding balloon, the frightened workers standing in the dark and the rain.

Hillsboro is a hardscrabble town whose residents pull together in hard times. They have been doing so for more than a year to meet the needs of a food pantry that went from serving 70 families last year to 120 this year.

In a matter of days, Concord will see the opening of its second shelter for homeless families. But the shelter, in a Concord Housing Authority building near the Merrimack County Superior Court, will only operate for one year before the space it occupies is renovated for low-income apartments. That means the time to think about a long-term solution to the problem is now - not, as has happened in the past few years, once winter has set in.

An unemployed American does not contribute to Social Security or Medicare or to the U.S. Treasury through employment taxes but does deplete the already strained unemployment benefits. The unemployed spend less on goods and services, straining an already weakened marketplace and, in turn, causing more layoffs.

I was shocked by the Boscawen selectmen's decision to remove stop signs at the intersection of Jackson Street and April Avenue.

I 'm writing with pride, in praise of the hardworking team of city workers who maintain White Park.

I recently acquired 1970 and 1979 Concord phone books, treasure troves of memories. I'd guess that 80 percent of 1970s area businesses are gone.

A defense contractor has come under fire for printing Bible references on combat rifle sights, a practice that has gone largely unnoticed in the 15 years the company has been doing business with the U.S. military.

Anti-gay marriage activists in New Hampshire have started the year with a three-pronged effort to impose state-sanctioned discrimination against their neighbors. All three should fail.

The Concord Conservation Commission maintains a $1 million trust fund to enable it to act quickly when prime open space becomes available. In these hard times, it's not surprising that some city councilors want the commission to take $100,000 from that fund.

The unemployment rate in New Hampshire is significantly lower than that in most of the country, but that's cold comfort to the more than 50,000 residents who are out of work - not to mention the thousands of others who have faced wage and benefit cuts in the past year.

Concord Superintendent Chris Rath has given the school board - and the community - a fun and important challenge. By December she'd like names for the city's three new elementary schools.

The Massachusetts special election that will soon install Republican Scott Brown in the Senate seat held by Ted Kennedy for 47 years is worthy of Greek tragedy. Kennedy, the lion of the Senate, made health care for all the major goal of his political career, and he fought for that goal to his dying day. Brown was elected on a pledge to thwart the health care reform effort Kennedy supported.

President Obama took office one year ago today. Tradition requires an assessment of his performance, yet it's impossible to fully grade a president who has so much riding on an enormous and still incomplete first-year mission: reforming the nation's health care system.

Asked to put a face to the word "vulnerable," most of us picture an infant or small child. Like most of the rest of the animal kingdom, we humans are genetically programmed to look out for our youngest populations, and in recent years we have elevated this instinct to an art form, enveloping our offspring in every imaginable safety product from the moment they leave our wombs.

Today, in a sign of progress that long seemed unimaginable, America celebrates its first Martin Luther King Jr. Day with a black president in the White House. But Barack Obama's election did not mark the fulfillment of King's dream. King fought not just for civil rights, but also for economic justice.

The Legislature opened the Laconia State School at the turn of the 20th century at the urging of the New Hampshire Federation of Women's Clubs to care for "the feebleminded." By 1978, when the lawsuit over inhuman conditions that led to the school's closing was filed, the school was home to roughly 1,000 people.

IIf New Hampshire lawmakers still harbor any doubt about the need for a mandatory seatbelt law, Sunday's fatal crash in Salisbury should clarify their thinking.

It will be days before a reliable estimate of the number of people killed or injured by the massive earthquake that leveled most of Haiti's capital city of Port au Prince can be made. But the death toll will be high. The city consisted of perhaps 3 million mostly impoverished people crammed into concrete buildings. Some Haitian officials fear the dead may number in the hundreds of thousands. Bodies are being lined up along the city's streets.