CapitalistImperialistPig

Gold above $800, crude looking to attack $100, and the Dollar dropping like a stone against Euro, Pound, and other Western currencies, while the stock market surges. What's going on here? My guess: the first hints of the long threatened unravelling. The US is, and has been, living well beyond its means, borrowing to finance consumption. This year, for example, we will run a current account deficit of about a trillion dollars, or $3000 per American. Two factors have conspired to make this happen: the suicidally reckless economic policies of the Bush administration and China's determination not to let its own trade be balanced. The US is the classic profligate, borrowing and spending like crazy, while China, Japan, and expecially the Gulf states play the role of the irresponsible banker willing to keep lending no matter what. Bartender: That damn drunk keeps running up his tab and never paying. Customer: Why don't you cut him off? Bartender: I can't afford to. He...

Josh Marshall has a video of the debate on attacking Iran between arch-neocon Norman Podhoretz and disillusioned neocon Fareed Zakaria. NP's entire argument is "Hitler, Hitler, Hitler." As Josh points out, the comparison is utterly absurd, but neocons seem immune to logic. It's almost an insult to what the world faced in the late 1930s. Germany, industrial powerhouse, with arguably the most powerful army in the world, at the forefront of technology, overawing and invading neighboring countries. Iran, minor economic power, second or third-rate military power, which may get a couple of small nuclear-weapons compared to the couple hundred high-end nuclear warheads in Israel's arsenal (plus, a robust second strike capacity, as Fareed notes) and the many thousands we have -- and our blue water navy, satellites, air force. Please. Time's running out for us? We're going to look back on this fifty years ago and see the non-podhoretz-loons as the Chamberlains of...

I've been reading Richard Dawkins's book The Ancestor's Tale and one particular message (so far) stands out. Because inheritance occurs in discrete genes and because genes get shuffled, the ancestral path for different bits of DNA is different. At a particular allele, (non-identical) siblings might each be more closely related to separate chimpanzee individuals and the common ancestors of both humans and chimpanzees than they are to each other. Blood types seem to be an example. I find this to profoundly non-intuitive, but quite undeniable. Overall, of course, the siblings share many more genes with each other than with chimps, but that is in some sense an average effect. Because chimps and humans separated at least 6 million years ago, the separate blood types (and their genes) must have persisted simultaneously through all the 400,000 or so generations in between - there hasn't likely been gene flow in the interim. Of the 2^400,000 ancestral slots from six-millio...

Glenn Greenwald has a series of posts on an email he received from General Pretraeus's chief spokesman, Colonel Steven Boylan. Or apparently received, since Boylan has since vacillated between denying that he sent the email and being evasive. Whoever sent it, if not Boylan, did a good job of fabricating the email headers, not to mention Boylan's literary style. It seems to have started with Greenwald noting that the military seems to have become politized, with Petraeus in particular plugging into right wing blogs and news sources. One rumor has it that Petraeus has expanded his horizons beyond Iraq, and is contemplating high political office - say the Vice Presidency. Whether or no, politization of the military stinks. It might be time for Congress to take a look. Read Glenn for the details.

Obama has apparently decided to go after Hillary on Social Security. Josh Marshall catalogs a few of the reasons that's a pretty stupid idea: If Obama is hoping for an issue to gain traction with vis a vis Hillary, he's really muffed it picking Social Security. In itself the idea of removing or significantly restructuring the 'cap' on payroll taxes is a good one, at least one with a lot to recommend it. The current approach (though one with a long history and embraced by many strong Social Security advocates) makes the funding structure of Social Security highly regressive. But what Obama is doing is buying into the false idea that Social Security is in some sort of crisis. It's Iran, stupid! In front of everyone's eyes we are creeping toward a catastrophic replay of the mistakes the country made half a decade ago in Iraq. You hear the same arguments -- 'time is not on our side,' etc. All nonsense. Even among the 'sensible' people on this issue...

I have to love a mathematician who explains transitivity of idempotents in term of socks and shoes. Conceptual Mathematics: A First Introduction to Categories by F. William Lawvere and Stephen Hoel Schanuel, page 55. Now a dirt cheap $19.96 at Amazon.

Francois Furstenberg, writing in The New York Times sees Bush and his allies as the new Jacobins. There are enough points of similarity to once again illustrate Mark Twain's principle that History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. . . . future historians examining Mr. Bush’s presidency within the longer sweep of political and intellectual history may find the French Revolution useful in understanding his curious brand of 21st- century conservatism. Soon after the storming of the Bastille, pro-Revolutionary elements came together to form an association that would become known as the Jacobin Club, an umbrella group of politicians, journalists and citizens dedicated to advancing the principles of the Revolution. The Jacobins shared a defining ideological feature. They divided the world between pro- and anti-Revolutionaries — the defenders of liberty versus its enemies. The Jacobins saw themselves as missionaires of liberty with a global mission, and soon launched preventi...

Is Holy Joe mobbed up? Edmund H. Mahoney and Jon Lender of The Courant report : Contributions from associates and friends of now-indicted garbage executive James Galante to the 2004 presidential campaign of U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman have sparked the interest of federal investigators.

The dollar extends its plunge:

Josh Marshall wonders: Question I'm trying to think through: in US history, how many elected officials have ever tried to make arrangements to remain in office beyond their legally-sanctioned term of office? Beside Rudy, that is. Not to worry though. Rudy would be pretty much just another term lifetime of Bush .

Arctic sea ice stopped declining about a month ago, after the Sun went below the horizon and the long winter night began. The sea ice anomaly, the amount by which the Arctic sea ice coverage differs from the mean for that day of the year has not recovered. It has, in fact, continued its dramatic decline, losing about another million km^2 in the last month.

NPR this morning: taken to see men who admitted to being paid agent of Iran in Iraq. They had clearly been tortured ("covered with blood, crying, unable to walk") - so what the hell does anything else in the story mean - they said what their interrogators told them to say, end of story. The story, of course, was full of lurid details. Maybe they were true. We don't know, and can't know anything except what their interrogators wanted them to say. At least NPR mentioned the torture bit. The rest of the story should never have been run. I'm ashamed that I sent NPR money.

It seems to be pretty hard for Congress to get Bushies to answer questions. How about they authorize themselves to use all measures short of torture to get answers - at least they might get Mukasey to figure out what he considers torture. Waterboarding is quick, so they say.

Bee has been reading The Upside of Down : Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization By Thomas Homer-Dixon. The theme, I guess, is civilization's dependence on limited resources and its consequent fragility as we approach the our planet's limits. I haven't read the book, but the subject is a frequent theme of mine. In particular, energy is finite and critical. Bee notes: Yet we are living in a society that disregards its limits. There is no doubt growth can't proceed forever, energy resources are not infinite, and more is not always better. Sure, one can debate exactly when and how a change will set in, but there is no way disregarding the fact that we have to address these problems, and we should do so rather sooner than later. In his latest book "The Upside of Down" Thomas Homer-Dixon addresses the question of how crucial energy resources are for our societies to maintain their complexity. In a nutshell the argument is that it takes energy to ...

Readers have seen me rage against the Dem's cowardice about confronting Bush, especially on the war and abuses of power. This, apparently, is due to the reluctance of swing State Dems to get off the fence for fear of being tarred with the anti-patriot brush. The calculation they seem to be making is that we, the anti-Bush party base, have nowhere else to go, so they can afford to ignore us. Republicans don't make that particular choice. For them, the base is all - please the base no matter how nuts you have to be, and damn the torpedos. They fear their base with a holy fear born of painful experience. Democrats, it seems, don't. Maybe it's time to get a bit scarier. Weak and cowardly Dems need to be punished, maybe even at the risk of the Republicans doing better than expected. Maybe targetting a few egregious cowards in the primaries is the secret. Give the rest a whiff of grape-shot.

Dividing the world up into us and them is clearly built into our genes. I suppose that when our ancestors were hunter gatherers it was crucial to draw that line between family and band, between band and others. I recently watched a movie ( Freedom Writers ) about a tough high school in Long Beach. Every kid knew who his ethnic homies were, and Blacks and Cambodians and Hispanics and Whites each had their tribe and territory - straying into the wrong territory would earn a beat down or death. A suburban high school might have its slightly less fierce jocks, geeks, goths and popular kids. Family and close allies are not big enough to carry much weight in a complex society, so bigger groups often arise. They are social constructs, but we build such constructs so effortlessly that it has got to be built in. In many societies, one of those organizing principles is race, and few care about the details or reality of any biological underpinning. Paul Krugman recently wrote a book demonstrating...

John McCain promises that if elected, he will shoot bin Laden. **itt Romney, who has a bit of trouble with names , responded by saying that he wants to take out Obama Osama too - with his small varMitt gun, no doubt. Uh, John - WTF are you waiting for? Do it now and you might even get nominated.

OK, at last some signs that the screams of the base are being heard. Thanks to those screams, and the courage of Senator Dodd, some resistance to telecom immunity seems to be developing. Obama and maybev even HRC have signed on. Now if only we could get something going against Mikey "Torture, what torture?" Mukasey, we might get somewhere.

An economist and a climate scientist were driving a mountain road at night when the economist made the mistake of talking while chewing gum and drove off the cliff. As they plummeted into the abyss - Climate Scientist: I don't see this ending well. Economist: What are you talking about? It has been nothing but smooth air so far! Steven Landsberg is a professor and house economist to Slate . His column on the occasion of Al Gore's Nobel managed to provoke your always and ever mild-mannered correspondent. Save the Earth in Six Hard Questions What Al Gore doesn't understand about climate change. This was enough to set off my bullshit detectors. Let me summarize his six "hard questions" and my reactions: 1) How much does human activity affect the climate? ........Well OK, Steevoh - Al and cowinners got you covered here. 2). How much harm (or good!) is likely to come from that climate change? .......Roger that. A hard question but one people are working hard to qu...

A large chunk of the American electorate voted Democratic in the last election in the hope and expectation that a Democratic Congress would act to roll back some of the Bush abuses of power and do something to end the war. This Congress has failed utterly at both and we are plenty bitter. Chris Floyd, subbing for Glenn Greenwald, can safely be counted among the shrill. Outrage follows outrage, surrender follows surrender: Every day the unreality of our political discourse worsens, even as the reality on the ground grows more bitter and uncontainable. As we approach the anniversary of the Democrats' recapture of Congress -- an event that was supposed to mark the repudiation of the Bush administration's lawless, blood-soaked enterprise -- it is undeniable that the situation is actually worse now than before. The prospect of a Democratic victory in 2006 was for many people the last, flickering hope that the degradation of the republic could be arrested and reversed within the o...

Richard Mellon Scaife is a name more or less synonymous with the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. His money funded the American Spectator's relentless but mostly fruitless search for something to pin on the Clintons, and his money is a key underpining of a range of right-wing stink tanks. He's a billionaire, not one of the really big billionaires, but still comfortable, and he made his money the old fashioned way, by inheriting it. It's nice to know, though, that even an old scoundrel like RMS knows how to have fun. A lot of the details are coming forth thanks to an angry divorce. David Segal's Washington Post story dishes some of the dirt. The tasteful headline reads: Low Road to Splitsville: Right-Wing Publisher's Breakup Is Super-Rich In Tawdry Details Segal can't resist some schadenfreude : Remember him? The cantankerous, reclusive 75-year-old billionaire who's spent a sizable chunk of his inherited fortune bankrolling conservative causes and trying to...

A MarketWatch lede from 2002 reminds us why Cheney, Halliburton, and Exxon Mobile wanted the war in Iraq: Asia-Pacific stock markets fell across the board Monday, as renewed concerns that the U.S. could be moving closer to attacking Iraq helped to send crude prices surging above $30 a barrel. Oil hit $90 last week. It's not about oil - it's about oil prices and profits.

The notion that race is a social construct is one of those deeply counter-intuitive notions that on closer examination appears to be undeniable. It's non-intuitive because we can each look at a random sample of other people and have a pretty good idea what continent the majority of their ancestors came here from. In favor of the social construct idea are the following: mixing occurs wherever peoples from different populations interact, in spite of often stringent social prohibitions; there is good biological evidence to believe that gene flow is not a "new" (last few hundred years) phenomenon; and finally, our intuitive classifications are often wrong or incomplete. In the United States, for example, most people classed as "Black" have at least some European ancestry, and, according to wikipedia : the majority of the persons with African ancestry are classified as white. The fact that race is "social construct" doesn't imply (to me, at any rate) th...

It seems that oil production plateaued in 2005 and hasn't increased since. Does that mean that the long rumored peak oil is at hand - or has already even occurred? The ever rising price of oil suggests that neither supply nor demand has a lot of ready elasticity. The long dreaded $100/bbl might be just around the corner and it makes everyone pretty darn nervous. Producers are nervous for fear that it might cause a world wide crash that destroys the price and destroys their ever increasing investments in the rest of the world. Consumers are nervous just because of the looming crash. My own highly inexpert opinion is that the peak ain't here yet. It's possible that some Saudi and other fields have hit the wall, and that might mean that we really do hit $100, but I expect that the investment triggered by the record prices will kick in more production over the next few years. Or not.

Here is the funny thing: IQ is being used to rate, admit, qualify, and select us all the time, but nobody knows the answer to the title question. Nobody knows what the psycho-neural substrate that determines IQ is. That fact leads some people (including some very high IQ people) to deny that IQ is a meaningful concept. That view is hard to defend in the face of conclusive evidence that whatever IQ is, (1)It can be measured, (2)It is reproducible and stable throughout adulthood, (3)It is highly predictive of accomplishment in a wide variety of skills, from engineer to manager to football quarterback to infantryman. The concept was invented to determine degree of mental retardation in school children, but its use has spread throughout society. I am a bit embarrassed to admit that my own children were IQ tested before their fourth birthdays (an admission requirement for a certain preschool). Most American children are IQ tested in school, and employers from WalMart to Microsoft to the Nat...

Hermann Goering on the need to invade France: I think it [the invasion of France*] was unquestionably worth doing, Charlie. ... We needed to go over there, basically, um, and um, uh, take out a very big state right in the heart of that world and burst that bubble, and there was only one way to do it. ... What they needed to see was German boys and girls going house to house, from Lyon* to Paris*, um and basically saying, "Which part of this sentence don't you understand?" You don't think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we're just gonna to let it grow? Well Suck. On. This. Okay. That Charlie was what this war was about. We could've hit Norway*, it was part of that bubble. We coulda hit Belgium*. We hit France* because we could. Oops! My bad. I guess that wasn't really Goering. It seems that that was really little Tommy Friedman on invading Iraq. The survivors of 4000 dead Americans and a million dead Iraqis thank...

... science is not here to make us feel good. ...............James D. Watson The ancient Greeks were said to have believed that the brain was fundamentally a cooling organ - a big old radiator. There is no more poisoned subject for research or discussion than the question of race and IQ. I don't want to stick my head into that particular buzz saw, but let me mention a related, but perhaps slightly safer topic. One of the first things we were taught back in ancient times when I studied physical anthropology, was the measurement of the cephalic index. If I remember correctly, it is the ratio of head length to head width. Students were ask to volunteer to be measured, and some were brachicephalic (round headed) some mesocephalic (medium) and others dolichocephalic (long headed.) I can't remember what my numbers were, but I do recall that the class (and prof) laughed when I volunteered. It seems that my head shape is more or less indistinguishable from that of a bowling ball...

Michael Schwartz, writing in Huffpost , links to an Asia Times article by Pepe Escobar that claims that Iraqis may be deciding that they hate us and the Saudi Jihadis more than they hate each other. If true, this would be even more surprising than the Sun coming up tomorrow, but not by much. From Escobar: The ultimate nightmare for White House/Pentagon designs on Middle East energy resources is not Iran after all: it's a unified Iraqi resistance, comprising not only Sunnis but also Shi'ites. "It's the resistance, stupid" - along with "it's the oil, stupid". The intimate connection means there's no way for Washington to control Iraq's oil without protecting it with a string of sprawling military "super-bases". The ultimate, unspoken taboo of the Iraq tragedy is that the US will never leave Iraq, unless, of course, it is kicked out. And that's exactly what the makings of a unified Sunni-Shi'ite resistance is set to accomplis...

Via Slate . A new science fiction character is preparing to step off the printed page. Really. The creation of implantable human organs with an ink-jet printer isn't as far-fetched as it might seem, a materials scientist said—at least in the future. Scientists already use ink-jet cartridges to "print" stem cells into exacting patterns, and now engineers are taking the technology to a whole new dimension—quite literally—by exploring ways to print 3-D structures of cells. "It's a milestone that we can print all types of cells onto a surface with an ink-jet printer without them dying, even stem cells," said Paul Calvert, a materials scientist at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. "Doing this successfully in three dimensions, however, is like going from a black-and-white to a full-color." As if *that* could ever happen. Print Spock out a new brain, could you Bones. The poor SOB has no head for figures whatsoever. Always with those ridiculou...

Nobel Prizewinner James Watson, one of the four people most responsible for the discovery of the role and structure of DNA, has stirred up another hornets nest. Watson is famously abrasive - he called himself honest Jim, while then Harvard colleague Ed Wilson called him "the most unpleasant person he had ever met." A difficult genius, but definitely a genius. At 79, he is still willing to stir up trouble. The Independent reported on what he said in a newspaper interview: One of the world's most eminent scientists was embroiled in an extraordinary row last night after he claimed that black people were less intelligent than white people and the idea that "equal powers of reason" were shared across racial groups was a delusion. James Watson, a Nobel Prize winner for his part in the unravelling of DNA who now runs one of America's leading scientific research institutions, drew widespread condemnation for comments he made ahead of his arrival in Britain today ...

TPM has a nice video summary of the weekend's blather about attacking Iran. The usual idiots (McCain, Lindsey Graham, Bill Kristol) are cheering it on, Zbignew Brezinski says some wise words about the folly involved, and even Charles Krauthammer has some objections - though not the most cogent ones. Only ZB has any realistic apprehension of what the consequences would be. If there is a case for war against Iran, let Congress debate the matter and declare war. If the President usurps that power he should be impeached for treason. Nothing enrages me more against Hillary than her studied ambiguities on expanding the war and continuing torture. Please Democrats, don't nominate this woman!

It's pretty obvious that the primary system is broken. States are elbowing each other to be first. At this rate, the 2012 primaries will be held in 08. The core problem is a historical pattern that gave two small States a hugely outsized role in deciding Presidential nominees. Clearly it's time for some kind of National Primary that gives the country a chance to look over the Candidates without having time to become utterly bored with the whole process. The answer is America's Next President! , the television show. The idea would be a series of feats of political strength, perhaps including realistic dilemmas faced by actual Presidents, Commentary by pundits and historians, followed by rating and voting, sort of like Dancing with the Stars . After each show, one loser could be voted off, thus clearing the way for the front runners to show their stuff in more detail. In ten weeks or so, we could be down to the nominees, after which the campaign could continue as usual...

Oil at $86 and I can't believe I'm not yet screaming with pain every time I fill up. Seems like gasoline is still about 20 or 30 cents cheaper than it was when oil hit $72. Doesn't seem likely to last.

I've noticed that WB has a new blog, but I'm afraid to link to it for fear it will vanish like the others.

Harold Bloom, whatever his critical successes in youth, seems lately to have doddered into the role of unlucky crank. Unlucky, I mention, since no sooner had he loosed a volley at this year's literature Nobelist, calling her award "political correctness," than the New York Times unearthed a 1992 Op-ed by Doris Lessing on PC and related linguistic abuses. Lessing is more interesting than Bloom, though, so I want to consider a bit more of what she said. A primary theme was that Communism had loosed a catastrophic pollution into language, and that that pollution had spread far beyond the left. Eli Rabbett has pointed out that the language of the rightwing nutjobs protesting Al Gore's Nobel borrows from Stalinist racial rhetoric. More tragic than the impoverishment of language is the associated impoverishment of mind. The totalitarian mind can't bear contradiction and so must villify criticism and suck all the life out of thought. There is obviously something v...

In one of those moments of moral weakness that seem to be becoming more common, I bought a copy of Saunders MacLane's Categories for the Working Mathematician . My excuse was that it was cheap, and that they seemed to be fresh out of Categories for the Loafing Physicist . I had heard that Category Theory was largely about arrows and diagrams, so this sort of metageometric stuff seemed attractive to me. I also knew that category theory had its origins in homological algebra, and that I wouldn't recognize a homological algebra if it hit me on the head, and this should have been a warning to me. MacLane, of course, is a very clear writer, and he presents his material in a lucid and well organized fashion. The problem, it seems, is that he is actually writing for an audience of mathematicians, so that the examples presented are often (usually) unfamiliar to me, and the arguments often a bit too abstract for the very limited space in my mathematical abstractions registers. Fortunate...

I couldn't resist touring a few wingnut sites to watch the wailing and gnashing of teeth over Gore's Nobel. It turned out not to be a total waste since K-Lo at The Corner linked to this Scrappleface bit : Gore Wins Nobel Prize, High Court Gives It to Bush by Scott Ott · 31 Comments (2007-10-12) — Although former Vice President Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize this week for his work as a global-warming performance artist, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled early today that President George Bush would receive the gold medal, the diploma and the $750,000...

Genocide is a new word but an old practice. A cynic once said that "genocide is God's way of settling territorial disputes." He had some Biblical evidence. The Bible is littered with cases where God either committed or commanded genocide - check out Joshua or Deuteronomy, for example. The practice didn't die out in modern times. The three most catastrophic genocides of the twentieth century were notable for their scale: Stalin might have killed 30 million, Mao a comparable or greater number, and Hitler 11 million. Hitler's genocide was notable in that most of the victims were Jews, and that it took place in what had been considered one of the most advanced and civilized nations of Europe. Because the chief targets and victims were members of the most cultured and literate group in the world, and because they were widely dispersed and well placed to claim their grievance, the word and the concept became recognized in law and popular thought. No such outcry greeted ...

Intenational sanctions are the world's favorite means of punishing people who happen to be oppressed by evil governments. Fareed Zakaria's latest Newsweek column talks about why this very blunt weapon is usually a bad idea. The Burmese government's grotesque crackdown on pro-democracy protests will have one certain effect. The United States and the European Union will place more sanctions on the country. Its economy will suffer, its isolation will deepen. And what will this achieve? Sanctions are the Energizer Bunny of foreign policy. Despite a dismal record, they just keep on ticking. With countries like Burma, sanctions have become a substitute for an actual policy. The problem is that the burden of sanctions falls on business and working people, while thugs and the government may well thrive. By design, sanctions shrink a country's economy. But the parts of the economy they shrink most are those that aren't under total state control. The result, says Robert Pape...

Congratulations to Al and all the IGPCC members and a hearty nyahh, nyahh, nyahh-nyahh to apoplectic wing-nuts everywhere

Arun asks: Facts 1. Polar ice melt this summer was unusual. 2. Atlantic hurricane season was very quiet. Question - hurricanes are a byproduct of necessary energy transfer from the tropics to the higher latitudes; but some mechanism is already working better than expected, melting so much polar ice. Is that why the hurricane season has been so quiet? I'd expect the Pacific season also to have been quiet. If the Antarctica has not been seeing unusual melts, the southern ocean cyclones should have been the same or worse. The Northern Hemisphere ice melt has been spectacular, but the South is pretty much trucking along as usual - peak ice was actually (barely) a record. See the charts at http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/ (Cryosphere Today). This year's Atlantic hurricane season has been odd, but not actually especially quiet by long term standards. Now to the point: If we look at net Northward heat transport (ocean plus atmosphere) as a function of latitude, it is nearly a...

Kevin Drum has a couple of charts showing just how flat our tax system is right now. When all taxes are considered, the top fifth pay about 19%, the bottom quintile 18%, and the middle three quintiles from 14% to 17%. The truly rich probably pay quite a bit less, since much or most of their income is hidden from taxation.

Kevin Drum knows whom he is cheering for in Friday's Nobel Peace Prize competition. Al Gore. And not because he thinks this will kick off a Presidential run - he thinks it won't. If Gore does win, I expect it to cause a massive collective seizure among the conservative crackpot brigade, and that would do more to advance the cause of world peace than anything else I can think of. So I'm rooting for you, Al. Sounds good enough for me!

Chess and scandal aren't exactly strangers, so I wasn't astonished to read of trouble in the United States Chess Federation(Disclosure: I'm a life member and have been for decades). Dylan Loeb McClain, writing in The New York Times reports: A lawsuit filed in federal court last week accuses two officers of the nation’s leading chess organization of posting inflammatory remarks on the Internet under false names in order to win election to the group’s board. The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday in Federal District Court in Manhattan, says that Susan Polgar and Paul Truong, who are married and who were elected to the board of the United States Chess Federation in July, posted thousands of remarks, many obscene or defamatory, over the last two years on two public Internet bulletin boards. Polgar is a former Women's World Champion - though not nearly as strong a player as younger sister Judit, and Truong also a strong player. The accuser's case apparently rests on the fact tha...

Andrew Sullivan links to John Cole's Balloon Juice. Cole takes issue with David Brooks' lame Op-Ed which meandered on about offending "conservatism’s Burkean roots." Yeah, whatever. Cole's take is more pungent: [He starts by talking about Jonah Goldberg's deranged attack on Obama's remarks on lapel pin flags, then goes on to:] For starters, people got tired of being associated with these drooling retards. Then, when they realized that these drooling retards had ideological allies running the show in the Bush administration and then began to experience their idiotic policies, they moved from disgusted to outright hostile. Like me. It had nothing to do with Burke, and everything to do with what the party had become. A bunch of bedwetting, loudmouth, corrupt, hypocritical, and incompetent boobs with a mean streak a mile long and no sense of fair play or proportion. Seriously- what does the current Republican party stand for? Permanent war, fear, the nanny ...

Andrew Sullivan examines the entrepreneurial George Bush: A quote to ponder: "I made my arguments and went down in flames. History will prove me right," - Texas Rangers owner George W. Bush after voting against realignment and a new wild-card system during a Major League Baseball owners meeting in September 1993. Bush was the lone dissenter in a 27-1 vote. I haven't a clue about these things, but apparently history has proven him wrong Now there's a shock.

Robert Pear, writing in The New York Times, looks at Bush's privatized Medicare insurance benefit and finds the predictable problems: Tens of thousands of Medicare recipients have been victims of deceptive sales tactics and had claims improperly denied by private insurers that run the system’s huge new drug benefit program and offer other private insurance options encouraged by the Bush administration, a review of scores of federal audits has found Probably the worst problem is the systematic denial of claims and obstruction of patient attempts to correct errors. One does not need to be a genius economist to understand the intrinsic problem of this type of privatization: it places the patient and the service provider in adversarial positions. The more effective the insurance company is in denying claims, the more money it makes - thus it has positive incentives to give poor service. This tactic is most effective with the sickest patients who are least able to defend themselves....

Two NYT columns on Clarence Thomas show what we who were shut out by the subscription wall have been missing. Frank Rich looks at Thomas sixteen years later and at the kid glove treatment he got from CBS's Sixty Minutes. Rich's treatment is a pretty critical look at a man still consumed by his resentments, and still lacking any redeeming quality of judicial temperment, but a frequently interesting read. Maureen Dowd, writing on the same topic, serves up another dreary helping of that patented bitchiness that seems long past its sell by date.

Inuit Holy Man Walks on Water: Fears Meltdown Due to Followers' Loss of Faith Fifty Year-old Woman Gives Birth to Own Grandmother Leading Republican Candidates No-Shows in Battle of Wits Scientists: Success in Search for Magnetic Dipole

Dear Dr. C., I just got out of rehab, but I'm afraid that as soon as I meet my friends I will start drinking and all those other behaviors that get me in trouble. I can't stand to sit at home and I can't sleep alone. .............................Lindsay Dear Lindsay, Start a blog. It can be almost as much fun as having a life - except for the sex, drugs, and alcohol, of course. Also, get yourself a cat. I care. Yours always (or at least since Mean Girls ), C, PhD PS - Don't forget to use spell-check. Dr C's Celebrity Help Column

Josh Marshall gets my nomination for this gem: It's been weeks since a prominent conservative institution has been rocked by scandal, so I suppose we were due for a story like this one. From the Justin Juozapavicius Associated Press story: ...Oral Roberts University President Richard Roberts, says God is speaking again, telling him to deny lurid allegations in a lawsuit that threatens to engulf this 44-year-old Bible Belt college in scandal. Richard Roberts is accused of illegal involvement in a local political campaign and lavish spending at donors' expense, including numerous home remodeling projects, use of the university jet for his daughter's senior trip to the Bahamas, and a red Mercedes convertible and a Lexus SUV for his wife, Lindsay. She is accused of dropping tens of thousands of dollars on clothes, awarding nonacademic scholarships to friends of her children and sending scores of text messages on university-issued cell phones to people described in the lawsuit...

Israeli policy analyst Daniel Levy has written a long and insightful review of M&W for Haaretz and Talking Points Memo . He previews his article: To briefly set out my stall: while I certainly take issue with the specific recent policy examples in the book (Iraq and Syria in particular), I would argue that the relationship between the US, Israel and the lobby that speaks in its name needs to change for everyone’s sake, that this book contributes to a re-think and that the authors are not driven by prejudice. His main criticisms of M&W (to me) are the following: M&W underestimate the role, influence and relative power of Christian Fundamentalists in the Israel Lobby, they overly conflate the IL with the neocons, and they exaggerate the continuity from pre-Bush to Bush. As to the first, he notes the oddity of House Speaker Richard Armey (a Christian fundamentalist) declaring: " my number one priority in foreign policy is to protect Israel ." How odd is it that a l...

A favorite but mercurial blogger has given some signals that he is yet again giving up blogging. The estimable, amusing, insightful and frequently idiosyncratic Dr. Beirl has left a couple of posts that seem to have that implication. Each is a bit hard to decipher, at least for me. This one seems especially obscure to me, partly because it is in German, but mainly, I suspect, because I don't know the reference. The other has some mordant humor, but seems a bit more direct - and it is in English. I will miss him, and hope he reconsiders if he can.

Paul Krugman goes looking for the soul of conservatism: In 1960, John F. Kennedy, who had been shocked by the hunger he saw in West Virginia, made the fight against hunger a theme of his presidential campaign. After his election he created the modern food stamp program, which today helps millions of Americans get enough to eat. But Ronald Reagan thought the issue of hunger in the world’s richest nation was nothing but a big joke. Here’s what Reagan said in his famous 1964 speech “A Time for Choosing,” which made him a national political figure: “We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry each night. Well, that was probably true. They were all on a diet.” He notes: Of course, minimizing and mocking the suffering of others is a natural strategy for political figures who advocate lower taxes on the rich and less help for the poor and unlucky. But I believe that the lack of empathy shown by Mr. Limbaugh, Mr. Kristol, and, yes, Mr. Bush is genuine, not feigned. M...

So why won't Hillary and Obama condemn the war and move to prevent Bush from bombing Iran? Jon Wiener of HuffPost talks to Seymour Hersh: I recently spoke with Hersh, whose new piece, "Target Iran," is featured in The New Yorker this week. When I asked Hersh who wants to bomb Iran, he said, "Ironically there is a lot of pressure coming from Democrats. Hillary Clinton, Obama, and Edwards have all said we cannot have a nuclear-armed Iran. Clearly the pressure from Democrats is a reflection of - we might as well say it - Israeli and Jewish input." He added the obvious: "a lot of money comes to the Democratic campaigns" from Jewish contributors So the Democrats "oh we are just too weak to stop the bad Bushies" is just a pose? No wonder Americans hate Congress as much as they hate Bush.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. asked two of his sons to publish his diaries posthumously, and, according to Newsweek, they have some good gossip from the old guy. My personal favorites are from Henry Kissinger: On Bush senior: "a very petty man" On Rumsfeld: "the rottenest person he had known in government." I knew that, and I never met either of them.

Listened to Sy Hersh talking about the Bush Administration plans to start a war with Iran The intel and military people talk to him, he says, because they figure Bush is nuts, and they want to try to stop the ensuing catastrophe. That, I guess, is the only ray of hope here. So who is for war? Cheney, of course, maybe Bush, the usual neocon Nazis (Norman Podhoretz, Bill Kristol, etc.), most Republican Candidates, and, of course, Freedom's Watch , the conglomerate of megarich Cheney friends and names they won't disclose). Put the heat on Obama and Hillary to denounce these "Swift Boaters for War."

Be it resolved that any initiation of hostilities against Iran or Syria without explicit authorization by Congress is an illegal usurpation of a power constitutionally reserved to the Congress, and further, that any such order to our military is an unlawful order which must not be obeyed. How about it Dems? If you are against war with Iran, put your vote where your mouth is. Go ahead, put in a few carefully structured exceptions - specifically excluding the kind of BS we have been hearing about Iran supplying IEDs to Iraqi insurgents - if that is the case, let the President show it in open Congressional debate. Make it clear that starting a war on your own is treason against the Constitution.