Good luck working for Hillary. I hope her position on Pakistan will amount to more than just blaming Bush for Musharraf.

The Constitution is, at best a talk show for the Bill of Rights crowd who get off endlessly screaming about guns, god and abortion and possibly the 4th amendment and to some extent the 8th . The rest of it is largely superfluous to the blogging classes and it always will be.

I don't care what the blogging classes think. If you're sick and you need to talk to your doctor about medical marijuana, the Constitution is not at all superfluous.

It protects your doctor's right to have an honest conversation with you without destroying his own career in the process.

Technically, it was Ashcroft who lost that case in the Supreme Court. But the case started out with Janet Reno's name attached. So I hope Hillary has more respect for the Constitution than her husband showed when he had Janet Reno go after doctors over medical marijuana.

That ruling has saved a lot of lives. Some of those saved lives have been officially counted. For example, hepatitis C patients have a much higher rate of compliance with antiviral therapy when they use pot, and that translates into fewer liver transplants and fewer deaths.

None of that would have been possible if Janet Reno had had her way with the First Amendment rights of doctors.

It's not a talk show. For some people the Constitution really is a life or death matter.

Simcha Jacobovici, the Naked Archaeologist. His shows are thoughtful and his personality is fun. His body doesn't look too bad either.

Oh, and I know I'm not going to convert anyone to the "it can be tough to be pretty" mindset, but there are drawbacks. Being too attractive can be seen as hazard in some professions - people assume you got there by sleeping with someone, not on any actual merit. So many people can't see beyond the pretty face to the individual inside, and yes, I know that's cliched, but there's truth to it.

Oh there's definitely truth to that. I've lived it.

Hey, I taught myself general relativity. I did independent study with Kip Thorne. I didn't need the class. Lots of Caltech students have trouble with that class. I didn't have any trouble. I just read the book and learned it. Voila.

But because I was attractive and shy, most of the people there just thought of me as a ditz. They talked about me like I was only admitted because I was married to someone who taught there.

People thought it was ditziness. Well it was really just sexual attractiveness plus Asperger's and a 136 IQ.

I guess that's why I'm not sorry to see wrinkles. I look less ditzy now. People seem much more willing to believe that I'm as smart as my Ph.D. says I am.

I hope he'll remind her that it was Benazir Bhutto, not George Bush or Pervez Musharraf, who funded the Taliban and sent them into Kabul so they could "stabilize" Afghanistan.

Since Bhutto has already apologized for having done this, it seems rather morally wrong to hang the crime on anyone else.

But that's what I see happening on the left. Rosa Brooks wrote a column just like Sidney's where the problems in Pakistan are all attributed to Musharraf and Bush.

The Democratic position on Pakistan needs to be a lot more sophisticated and historically informed than just blaming everything on Bush.

If you have a chance, it's a lot of fun.

"Find some gold -- but not my gold -- and sit on it."

Back in the nineties, Benazir Bhutto armed the Taliban and sent them into Afghanistan to "stabilize" the country.

If you were President, by what means would you hold her accountable for her disastrous error in judgment?

Would you ever be able trust the person who endorsed a pack of sociopathic women-hating thugs as the legitimate government of Afghanistan?

If she became the leader of Pakistan, what exactly would you say to her about the consequences of her mistake for this country?

After what she did, does she really deserve a second chance? Would you give her one if you were elected to the White House?

Someone ought to be asking these questions, because it looks like the Taliban's Mommy could end up running Pakistan again.

Giuliani is your man.

It was this nation that saved the world from the two great tyrannies of the 20th century, Nazism and Communism.

Except it was the Communists who saved the world from the Nazis. Americans only helped save Western Europe. The vast majority of WWII casualties and the most horrific and bitterly fought battles that inflicted the greatest damage to the Nazi war machine occurred on the eastern front.

If you're confused about that, there's a new book out right now about the Battle for Moscow that shows how they did it.

And by the way, it was also Communists who saved the Communists from Communism, if you want to get technical about, you know, Gorbachev and Yeltsin.

In fact if we do get technical about Gorbachev and Yeltsin, and look back to the end of the Cold War and the "peace dividend" in the nineties, it seems Communists once helped save America from the conservatives too.

But we can't count on that happening again. This time we're going to have to save ourselves.

writes for the sound of her own prose. No seriously. Her writing is more about her writing than anything she writes about.

Salon publicly reviled this woman.

Aren't you people here supposed to be against mind-blowing hypocrisy?

Why do you keep using her name to try to sell your copy?