"helping to run"? I guess.

"spearheaded"? No.

Check out this WaPo article (from precisely, to the day, a decade ago!) before getting hysterical about LaHood. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/stories/lahood121898.htm

Here are a couple passages:

Who knows -- maybe Rep. Ray LaHood will turn out to be a cannibal. But today, as the House begins its impeachment debate, the civil man from Illinois may be the best person the Republicans have left.

Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) couldn't chair today's proceedings because he's shivering in the ideological gulag. Speaker-elect Bob Livingston (R-La.) treated the whole affair like a live electric eel to begin with. Now, on the eve of a debate spurred by marital infidelity, he's confessed to "straying" from his marriage.

"No one is going to try any shenanigans with Ray in the chair," says Rep. Sherwood "Sherry" Boehlert (R-N.Y.), LaHood's landlord in Shirlington for two years. "That doesn't mean they're not going to try to prevail in their arguments, but they're not going to try any tricky parliamentary moves with him in the chair."

Or, as Rep. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) says: "When those dark eyes glare out over the podium and announce that 'The House will be in order,' it's not long before the House is in order."

This strikes me as a ho-hum pick- a nice, bipartisan guy, but not someone who will really reform or revisit our transportation strategy. Wait and see.

But it doesn't matter (much).

Judge Obama on what he gets done (on all fronts) by 2011-12. Don't bail on him because he's willing to invite a guy whose views you may find repugnant (or worse).

Obama is a pragmatist. He's not going to burn political capital on LGBT issues. That sucks for the LGBT community and their supporters (me among them), but it's the right strategy.

Lincoln, though he had spoken about the "monstrous injustice of slavery itself" in the 1850's, was very careful, very deliberate about how and when he started to end slavery. He pissed off abolitionists for a long time in the process, even though he ultimately was the one who delivered the goods.

Obama is trying to court evangelicals, who are almost by definition anti-gay marriage (Google Richard Cizik if you don't think so- he supported Prop 8 but still had to resign from the National Association of Evangelicals for even suggesting on NPR that he thought civil unions were OK). He intent to do so may or may not be a good strategy; we'll see.

It's awfully early to bail on Obama, no matter how insulted you are.

And let's not forget that Charles Mann was also the author of the recent National Geographic article on Yacouba Sawadogo, who is of course another HTWW fan favorite.

While zaï holes aren't related to archaeology, they are holes in the ground, and they have disproved a commonly accepted "fact" (that desertification can't be reversed).

Your legacy is now a tiny bit less of a disgrace.

Help us out buddy- what username were you using a month ago? Can you keep track?

This is a great example of why many of us avoided DRM music like the plague- you don't have much control over what you bought; you are at the mercy of the DRM.

I subsisted for years on burned CDs, eMusic, and then Amazon MP3. I never downloaded a song illegally- even though I think copyright law is outdated in some respects, it's still the law, and I don't mind paying for non-DRM digital music.

I did download one DRM'd song from iTunes, once. It was the only recording that I could find of a song that magically helped our baby fall asleep. So I went ahead and upgraded the other day- my iTunes library (about 60 Gigs) cost $0.30 to upgrade.

So what I guess I'm saying is, we told you so :p.

So you're telling me you traded convenience for freedom.

And that's why you are potentially out a couple hundred bucks.

... is getting a no vote from Vitter better or worse than being called a mother-f-bomb by Blagojevich?

Who's got the bragging rights, Hillary or Obama?

Salon doesn't do the spell-checking.

If you're using Firefox, right-click on the Obama with a red underline (I assume this is happening to you in the text box for writing letters), and choose 'Add to Dictionary' (or, select an alternative like "Obadiah").

Teddy Roosevelt busted the excesses of the robber barons; let's see what Obama can do.

@tbolioli: See http://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/senatestimamendment.pdf

Toenail fungus.

And the risk of liver damage (side effect of the most effective meds) just doesn't seem worth it, does it?

As an aside, I've noticed that the average rating for applications in the App Store tend to be pretty low.

I also noticed that Epiphany has 7 ratings- 6 are 5 stars, and 1 is 3 stars. Yet the average rating is shown as 2.5 stars. Is this Steve Job's reality distortion math?

One thing I haven't seen mentioned: Solar tends to get knocked for inconsistent supply; fair enough.

But solar also does something valuable: It's peak output tends to coincide fairly well with summer peak demand in areas with significant AC loads. I know here in New England the peak demand days are on hot summer days- precisely when solar output is near its max.

Solar's real competitors, price-wise, are the peaking units that have to start up to provide that extra demand from time to time. These have higher production costs than baseload plants. Further, the market price (due to both supply and demand) for electricity during these peak times can be much, much higher than $0.11 per kWh (see: California, rolling blackouts).

So grid parity may be here sooner than you think...

But when their faces light up when you walk into the house, man, there's nothing better.