Marriage, like any friendship, begins with areas of commonality, but the stresses of normal everyday life – children, work, finances, illness, caring for elderly parents – can tax the union and cause it to grow apart. Traditional marriage counseling is one way to deepen your friendship, but you can also engage in some simple practices.

Here are ten suggestions to cultivate a stronger relationship with your spouse. I've also included quotes from average folks that have successfully built this kind of friendship:

1. Recognize that friendship building takes a lot of work – and time. Cut the fat out of your day.
   • Establish a time each week to spend quality time together – then guard that time with your lives!
   • Choose to spend time together rather than apart. This may mean sacrificing good things for a season such as small groups, ministry, or bonding time with guys or gals. Read On

    

LIBERALS Actress Ashley Judd has finally earned her Hollywood stripes and provided award-winning comic relief. With Washington poised to shove a trillion-dollar "stimulus" pork pie down our throats, we need all the distractions we can get. I give Judd's unintentionally entertaining performance in a new Sarah Palin-bashing animal rights ad two diversionary thumbs up.

The Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund sponsored the YouTube video starring Judd. They've dubbed their campaign, launched this week, "Eye on Palin." With all the serious, socially responsible celebrity earnestness she could muster, Judd decried the aerial hunting of wolves in Alaska, the GOP governor's state. "It is time to stop Sarah Palin and stop this senseless savagery," Judd intoned.

Casting herself as an environmental expert, Judd attacked Palin for "casting aside science and championing the slaughter of wildlife." The video shows a wolf being shot, writhing in pain, with an ominous soundtrack throbbing and menacing photos of Palin flashing across the screen. Read On

NO BAILOUT In one of history's more candid reflections, Henry Morgenthau Jr., Treasury Secretary under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, confessed, "We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before, and it does not work."

Just six years after crafting the New Deal, Morgenthau declared that efforts to create jobs and restore America's ravaged economy by expanding the federal government to unprecedented levels been a failure. By Morgenthau's own assessment, the New Deal saddled our country with "as much unemployment as when we started ... and an enormous debt."

More than 75 years have passed since FDR signed the New Deal into law, and many noted economists are studying the Great Depression and trying to learn from the experience. In 2004, a team of UCLA economists concluded that the policies of the New Deal, which suppressed competition and kept unemployment in the range of 9 percent to 16 percent, actually prolonged the depression by seven years. Read On

"A failure to act, and act now, will turn crisis into a catastrophe."
-- President Obama, Feb. 4.

WASHINGTON -- Catastrophe, mind you. So much for the president who in his inaugural address two weeks earlier declared "we have chosen hope over fear." Until, that is, you need fear to pass a bill.

And so much for the promise to banish the money changers and influence peddlers from the temple. An ostentatious executive order banning lobbyists was immediately followed by the nomination of at least a dozen current or former lobbyists to high position. Followed by a Treasury secretary who allegedly couldn't understand the payroll tax provisions in his 1040. Followed by Tom Daschle, who had to fall on his sword according to the new Washington rule that no Cabinet can have more than one tax delinquent. Read On

The Southern California mother of octuplets receives $490 a month in food stamps and three of her first six children are disabled and receiving federal assistance, her publicist confirmed Monday evening. Spokesman Michael Furtney said Nadya Suleman did not want to disclose the nature of the disabilities, or the type or sum of the payments. Furtney confirmed the public assistance payments after two sources told The Los Angeles Times that Suleman was receiving food stamps and federal supplemental security income. "In her view these are just payments made for people with legitimate needs and are not, in her view, welfare," Furtney said. "She just believes that there are programs for people with needs and she and her children qualify for some of them." In an interview that aired Monday, Suleman told NBC "Today" show anchor Ann Curry that she does not receive welfare. Her six other children are under the age of 7. All 14 children were the result of in-vitro fertilization. Suleman was implanted with embryos at a Beverly Hills fertility clinic run by a well-known — and controversial — specialist who pioneered a method of implantation. Octuplets' Mom on Welfare, Spokesman Confirms

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