Writer Amy Wilentz describes the Benazir Bhutto she knew:

I'd known her for years, on and off -- mostly off -- since we'd been in college together, and her brother, Mir Murtaza Bhutto, had been a good friend of mine there too. To be a Bhutto seemed -- to us outsiders -- the essence of glamorous progressivism. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, their father, was the democratically inclined president of Pakistan, and we thought of the Bhutto family as Pakistan's Kennedys. Benazir, in jeans and sweaters with her straight black hair, was a torrent of energy; she was garrulous and articulate, skinny as a rake, unfailingly present and engaged, intellectually curious and as ready as a teeny-bopper to chase after every little piece of life she could get.

"Those were fun days, nice days," she said to me this fall.

But these days: less fun, was the implication....

Also on the Op-Ed page, the Big Fix series continues, asking experts how to survive the housing bust.

The editorial page features the eighth installment of the American Values series, on 'the general welfare.'

Pro-dog readers defend their pets against Will Beall's Op-Ed. Pacific Palisades' Rita Burton says, "Before Beall has a doggy meltdown, perhaps someone should remind him about obnoxious parents and their equally obnoxious children in restaurants, theaters and shopping malls."