"Vanessa Williams Tarnishes Miss America Crown with Sexist Objectification".

I'll admit I never saw that coming. What's next, Larry Flint destroys Libertarianism?

Last year totally f'ed up women's tennis: Justine Henin retired completely unexpectedly right before the French, Sharapova sustained a serious shoulder injury around the same time (from which she's just now recovering), and the Williams sisters--well, they don't really care enough about the smaller tournaments to build & sustain enough of a points lead to stay at the top. Dinara Safina, meanwhile, is the 2nd player in the last year to get to #1 w/o winning a major (Jelena Jankovic was the other).

I'm not counting on the WTA tour to look much more sensible in the near future, either. Safina may turn out to be the real deal (her brother was/is a not-too-shabby player, when not totally melting down), and Victoria Azarenka & Caroline Wozniaki (sp?) are promising up-and-comers, but the Williams Sisters ain't getting any younger, it'll be surprising if Sharapova is ever her old self, and Ana Ivanovic & Jankovic are looking to add their names to the interminable list of women players who can't keep their heads together for more than a week at a time.

Reports say the plane may have been over open ocean, perhaps as far as the coast of Africa. God help any survivors & best wishes to the families involved. My mom's overseas right now, but this is the kind of accident I hate to see at any time.

racist violence for causing the stupid racist violence. And somehow I think your reading is backwards: it is normally when groups begin trying to integrate that they become more visible and/or "threatening" to the racial purists & traditionalists who are ready to sharpen screwdrivers and start terrorizing the racial population.

If I had to guess, I'd say economic hard times are causing more disaffected Australian youth to feel resentment and lash out in the time-honoured way against those who are both powerless and nominally more successful with better prospects.

since the article doesn't say what the rates are for the general population. i.e. are Indians a disproportionate # of crimes compared to the rest of the pop.?

And if so I wonder what the cause could be. In the US my impression is that Indians have a hard time mostly when they're mistaken for other minorities.

...easier to object to if it's explicit. Intolerance once in power is not an aberration of radical politics, but a near universal. Homosexuals are one of several convenient targets because they offend the concept of a "healthy proletariat" that conforms to social norms apparently abandoned by the wealthier segments of society. It's related to similar biases against "cosmopolitans", Jews, merchants, wealthy minorities (Chinese ones in most of Asia), etc.

At the root is the belief that undereducated manual laborers possess a particularly moral lifestyle, and those that don't conform to the proscribed methods for earning, spending living or procreating are in some sense unhealthy. You'll find it as a radical universal, from the USSR's Communists to the Nazis and nearly everything in-between.

Anyone can see Cheney is bluffing.

There were a lot of "ifs" in that case and very little clear evidence. If I'd been on the jury I'd have had trouble convicting him.

His gruesome appearance is probably due to the severe car accident he barely lived through in 1974.

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...I think the lot, left and right, are largely hypocrites. Or worse, blind to themselves.

I'm pretty irritated by a certain kind of death penalty activists...namely those who try to convince you everyone on death row is innocent. Some are, most aren't. Those people are missing the point in a really annoying way. The point is that the state shouldn't be executing even guilty people.

I'll have to think about my version of this list...I'd actually have to make one for both left & rightwing activists. (Bother me: Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, crusaders, unnecessary war... Don't bother me: military families, sincere Christians, W.F. Buckley, Reagan, apple pie, gun owners.)

My opposition to the death penalty has nothing to do with whether or not certain people "need killing", a question which is, to coin a phrase, above my pay grade. I just don't believe in giving the state the legal power to kill its citizens.

If it weren't for Serena Butler the human race would still be enslaved by the thinking machines. I think she deserve a lot more respect than you are giving to her.

//this can't be obscure.

--minus the health care thing--all seem to be similarly feckless.

So why are you bothered by post-structuralists? I mean ... are they even around anymore?

Things that don't bother me:

-- His lack of disgust for atheists + commies

-- His blase attitude about government healthcare

-- His study abroad and military background

Things that Do Bother me:

-- His obsession with medieval scholarship

-- His capacity to make lists with bullets and bolding

-- That I thus far haven't been able to push his buttons

What's the GOP going to do for an encore? Leap from airplanes, sans parachutes, and aim for Obama's motorcade?

However, comparing them to the KKK is a tad overblown. Fantasies about taking over the southwestern United States for "The Race" doesn't quite measure up to the whole lynching and cross-burning thing as far as crazy racist groups are concerned.

And could that be a desperate expression of whatever faint, fading kernel of self-awareness is still able to make itself heard in Erickson's tortured psyche, a repressed recognition of the fact that Limbaugh & co. have promoted themselves exactly to the point where they cease being helpful to the conservative movement?

Nah. He probably just couldn't think of anything original.

He's not allowed in -- and there's no Sting, no Keanu, no Tesh, and no TV Vincent D'Onofrio either.

That's some interesting insight for a man of the cloth.

But hold on just a tic...if homoerotic lust is "unbridled" doesn't that mean good, clean heterosexuality is necessarily "bridled"? And is that better? Is Pastor Hamman saying the proper way to embrace Our Creator is by slapping our lawfully wedded wives in riding tackle? Was there a production of Equus in Wasilla this year, and is this guy running a flock, or a stable? I don't recall Jesus saying anything about chains and whips and love in the traces, but this guy seems to be an expert, so...giddy-up!

It did make me very happy tho I wish Europeans didn't have to make a techno version of everything.

It would've pushed my 'innocent and sweet' buttons more if they'd just stuck with the original.

The Bush clip is an interesting juxtaposition, but in order to remind readers that life is not always as zippy and happy, I might've gone with this pic:

I think in this video, Traveller, you have the beginning, middle, and end of why we went to war in Iraq when we did. And it's this simple: Bush is not able to understand that the Mideast is made up of different countries, different people, rival ideologies. In his mind at the time They Attacked Us, therefore We'll Attack Them. Nevermind that "They" were a tiny group of religious extremists bent on drawing the US into war, and "Them" was a secular, multiethnic country bent on growing its standing at the expense of US interests. Al Qaeda and Saddam's Iraq had absolutely no interests in common...they were, in fact, mortal enemies...until we invaded and presented AQ with a chance to draw the US into a war of attrition. Iraq and al Qaeda are *still* mortal enemies...including the Sunni religious faction that has the most common ground with AQI. Failing to understand & exploit these differences is a strategic failure of the first order.

Our enemies, quite simply, are not all the same people. I honestly believe Bush was never able to grasp that simple truth. Ignorant, well-meaning men are easy to manipulate.

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It's frustrating that gtk/gnome apps behave strangely unless you also run gnome-settings-daemon in the background, and conversely kde apps have some quirks when kded/kdeinit aren't running the show.

Other than that though, there's still progress in the gnome world as well. If you have a laptop, for instance, and you're hurting for horizontal real estate on your screen, you can run gnome-panel at the top with window-picker-applet and maximus to move your window borders to the panel itself.

In terms of development, it's great that the kde folks decided to revamp their entire development kit, but the gnome people are also making progress through managed runtimes (mono) and a real language (Vala) with which to program against their object model (gobject).

In terms of interop, it looks like the Tracker (gnome) and Nepomuk (kde) teams are working together on a metadata indexing, storage, and retrieval system that's bound to be better than apple's Spotlight.

In summary, I come to extinguish the flamewar!

h/t volokh

was dead serious

Nate at 538 takes this one on... WIth the numbers.... I think the outrage is a bit false.... The key stat is control group.....
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/05/news-flash-car-dealers-are-republicans.html

But Mr. Silver is good at dealing with innumeracy.

Noted.

What heet said.

This is just stupid. What is the party affiliation/breakdown of all dealers who were not closed? That is the important piece of information that is somehow missing from your link. Until you know this, the whole thing is a pointless circlejerk.