comes as a result of the belief that private firm-developed pills are the reason of advances in healthcare.

I wonder how much other factors that play a role in life expectancy would change the graph..., smoking, diet of corn syrup...people realizing that the US already rations health care based on how much a special magic trustworthy cloth one has.

...to compare coverage of an actual felony versus a lawmaker versus the videos.

Or, in both cases, to John Edwards' hair.

on illegal wire taps

And I'd bet if you asked him directly he'd respond with that reply and not see any problem with it.

I believe I heard that a bill has been introduced in Vermont that states any pictures taken by onesself and sent to friends via email, etc. won't count as the distribution of child pornography.

Currently, as said above, if someone under the age of 18 takes a sexually suggestive picture of themselves and emails it to their boyfriend/girlfriend, they are, under the law, considered to be child pornographers and must register as sex offenders.

This is so completely insane one must think that the law exists solely to criminalize all sexual behavior by minors. Other than actually knocking boots, mind you. If you're 16 in the state of Ohio, you can engage in intercourse with anyone you damn well please. However, you're not allowed to watch a film of other people doing it or take pictures of yourself doing it. How illogical.

emphasis mine

I now have visions of Patrick Swayze's character in Donny Darko dancing in my head. I probably wouldn't want to see the list googled phrases Skumanick has done.

There must be very little real crime in Wyoming. I suppose though we can at least be grateful that he has some sort of urge to "reform" these flagrant criminals. I hope he also has the car thiefs writing essays and going to classes in order to feel ashamed of who they are.

I had accepted that Obama didn't want to be a good Democratic President; it never occurred to me that he didn't want to be President at all.

moment after the next.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/25/obama-spending-freeze-the_n_436244.html

Defense and homeland security can grow, but the 'relatively small portion' of the rest of the budget and any possible stimulus spending is off-limits.

And he'll still get heckled by the right. I'm flabbergasted. I laughed when i read a couple days ago that Evan Bayh thought there might be a spending freeze in the SOTU.

Yeah right, the D party is going to do a spending freeze with over 10% unemployment.

Plus Obama ran against McCain's spending freeze and lampooned it in the debates to great effect.

Taxing health care benefits and a spending freeze. 'Post-partisan' apparently meant 'moderate Republican'.

Here I was, busy looking for the source, while you were badmouthing me. :^(

...for a while, but I had no idea just how bad he'd gotten. Thanks for the link. I'll try to scrounge something up for him.

they missed calls and of the ones they made plenty were bad. The ball must have been dipped in bacon fat because it should be known as Fumbledome.

But there were plenty of great plays and great individual efforts. It was a closer game than anyone had any right to expect. So I'll side with Zelig and say I thought it was a great game with some serious faults.

You missed the Alamo Bowl a few years back between Michigan and Nebraska, even the guy in the replay booth had some ax to grind.

Refs aren't infallible

Late hits on a 40 yr. old quarter back, penalties galore, bad calls, and then my home team who couldn't hold onto the ball to save their lives.

It looked like a beginning season game between two teams destined for losing seasons vs. a division championship.

By the end I was just glad the embarrassing game was over and I'm agreed that it turned me off of the NFL as well. I may not watch the super bowl.

really neither NO or MN looked like they deserved to be in the superbowl.

The NFL commissioner should just crown the Colts champions right now b/c the NFC didn't produce a team that meets a minimum threshold for being in the championship game.

Teabaggers use it every day. Sometimes explicitly, sometimes not. Sometimes they put it on signs, tho' their spelling is not always correct.

And you're worried about the appearance of the word in a subject heading?

Again. Heh.

-nt

In some workplaces having the word on your screen gets you in trouble, regardless of context and whether it's being quoted favorably or unfavorably. Worse, it might get the site blocked, and then I might have to do some actual work.

So it's your opinion that Reid's inappropriate use of language was viewed as correct on the left?

These folks live, by and large, in a world that lacks an objective reality. To them, there's no meaningful difference between fact and fiction, or what people say or what people do. That's why the tribalism is so important; if you don't have a strong personal foundation in understanding how the world functions, you need other people to take cues from. They think we think like they think. And since "empathy" is a dirty word . . .

offers much better avatar stock.

Which one to pick?

.

....guaranteed issue works is if coupled with a mandate. Otherwise the rational person stays out until they need it. Now check how well a mandate polls.

While it's true, "the Americans are coming" was once a cause for a frisson of joy in the hearts of suffering people everywhere, that's no longer true. Four million Iraqi refugees, that's about half the population of Haiti, are still displaced by America's idiocy. Nobody talks about the refugees of Somalia and Darfur these days. The Hmong, very dear to my heart, are being forcibly evicted from their camps in Thailand, sent back to their deaths in Laos.

Lost in the welter of human tragedy are the refugees themselves. We see their plight but do we see them? When the next crise du jour arrives, there will be another concert featuring well-meaning actors and singers, tearfully crooning sappy old songs, but nobody's calling for the abolition of Haiti's kleptocracy and the creation of a meaningful government for the worst-run nation in the Western Hemisphere.

The Americans came to Iraq. It's now a wreck. It's an Islamic state run by a pack of Shiite zealots. When we leave, (and it's happening even now), these quarrelsome beneficiaries of our treasure and blood will again return to their endless bickering and the refugees will go on suffering.

The American military came to Haiti, over and over and over. It's a wreck, and it was a wreck before this earthquake, and nothing we've done there has helped the Haitians. We backed the most ferocious and oppressive dictators this hemisphere has ever known: Duvalier, père et fils, and that maniac priest Aristide. More history and less chamomile tea for Bob Greene.

If the teams are tied at regulation, apparently they're so closely matched that it really is down to luck which one wins. I mean . . . what else could it mean?

I can think of a game. World Cup soccer, when it is settled by penalty kicks. (which okay, is pretty rare.)

My peeve about football is the waiting:action ratio. I think only golf's is higher.

Herodotus, who wrote the first tour guide, wrote about the Temple at Delphi. Even then it was a tourist attraction, and was even then in ruins. He said "The untutored eye sees nothing"

American football is full to bursting with arcana and tradition, so I love it. For me, it's the totality of the experience: as with music, a topic you know far better (than most of us), football is much better live than on the television.

Baseball is nothing if not its officiating: every strike is a judgment call, every pitch a duel. I came to American sports later in life: it's never been a case of natural affection. I had to wrench myself out of cricket mode. But again, cricket, like baseball, survives translation to radio and print, where football just doesn't.

The greatest improvement we could make to American football is this: the announcers should STFU during the play. Patter is fine in its own way, but with football, I just turn off the sound. Put on some music and watch the game properly, without the idiotic banter.

...you're supposed to try to win the game in regulation.

but you go to the NFC Championship with the overtime system you have. It's not the system you might want or wish to have at a later time.

I'll be sad to see football go but there is always hockey to pick up where football left off. That and, of course the odd baseball game on television to help me with sudden, acute insomnia.

Most boring game. Ever. Hell, womens' curling is more exciting. Then again, I like curling a lot more than is healthy.

First of all, you're doing the dishes.

Second, teams don't just "march down the field". There's a group of players called the defense, and if they do their job the other team doesn't march down the field, in fact the team on offense could either punt or have the ball taken away from them - and if you watched the game, you would have seen that it happened with amazing regularity during regulation time in that game. If you had watched other playoff games this season you would also have known that a field goal is anything but guaranteed, even a short one.

I suppose in baseball they should add another half inning for the losing team to try to score again if they go into extra innings?

As can be seen here. I'm sure there's some secret guy code reason why it's considered too wimpy for the NFL. On the other hand, the NCAA won't give up on the lame BCS system and just give us a real playoff already, so that's a point for the NFL.

Why are so many Palestinians dumb enough to engage in this behavior?

Colour footage of the Warsaw Ghetto.

.

Gentle Ben is a better pick than most, and did what was necessary in the last two year. Obama is correct to re-appoint him, and those members of the GOP that threaten to block him are in error.

He should be reappointed, and he'll likely get enough GOP votes that reappointment will happen. Economists like Hamilton at EconBrowser agree with Obama, and so do loyal liberals like Brad DeLong and Mark Thoma.

'cause we all know the Republicans, virgins to the last man and women, whose kids are all products of immaculate conception, would never do that.

In other items that might be news...

*Water is wet.
*It's dark at night.
*The Pope is a practicing Catholic.

Ease up on the faux outrage, friend. You're gonna stroke out...

A good piece, and worth a read. Thanks!

n/t