Having effectively eliminated the secular buffer state between Saudi Arabia and Iran, Bush is now faced with an the awkward game of keeping his Saudi allies happy and still keep his Iranian leaning Iraqi government in power. It is probably a loser's gambit, all he will end up doing is alienating the Saudis and strengthening Iran. If he decides he needs the good graces of the Saudis more than the Iraqi government things will get strange indeed.

Great article with terrific photos. I've always known the crew had someplace to rest during long flights...and never begrudged them their rest...and it was interesting to see the variety of solutions that airlines have come up with.

It seems obvious to me that lack of basic civlity on the internet is common regardless of the gender of the author. Anyone who spends any time on sports blogs or boards will notice an extraordinary amount of invective and inchoherent rage. The very anonymity of the boards seems to encourage it. People write things that they would never say in public. That this slips into a vulgar hate fest against women doesn't surprise me. If you peruse any pornogrphic sites you will notice that there is a lot of verbal abuse on them similar to the messages Sierra received. I suspect when the writers send them they are they are acting out the same way they do when they go to pornographic web sites--they are doing something anyonymously that they could never do in public. There are a lot of twisted men out there who are constrained in public and unconstrained in private.

As someone who has attended minor league games in Dayton and Toledo for the last ten years I hate the idea of ESPN or any other network ruining what is a fun game to watch. Minor league baseball is fun. It is fun to watch and appears to be fun to play. I suspect the glare of televsion would ruin all of that. Go away and take your idea with you.

The smart car is a step in the right direction but like the hybrid it is just transitional technology. Soon enough, we will have to move away from gas and diesel to electric or hydrogen. That we aren't doing it more quickly is a crime.

What stuns me about the coverage of performance enhancing drugs is how much focus there has been on the players and how little attention has been paid to the role of the owners and Bud Selig. The powers that be in MLB knew what was going on and if they did not actively encourage it, they certainly gave it a wink and a smile. Bud Selig may not be as culpable as the players who actually took the drugs but his hands are still pretty dirty.

The simple reality of the situation with TSA employees is that it is easier to train them to enforce simple rules with no exceptions than it is to have them use their judgment. In this regard, the TSA is no different from any other large bureaucracy that is forced to employ low paid employees to administer complicated programs. Expecting them to use judgment in the myriad of situations that they have to deal with everyday as thousands of passengers file past them is probably asking to much.

I've lived in Ohio for the last twenty-four years and I think it is all going to come down to turn out. While I think McCain plays very well in Ohio, mostly because there is something familiar and comfortable about him to Midwesterners, there are two factors thay may allow Obama to grab the state. First, the Republican party is still in a state of disarray from the debacle of the Taft governorship. Secondly, for the first presidential election in decades the Democrats control state government. If the Obama campaign is as organized in Ohio as it claims to be and Strickland makes good on his promises to campaign the Dems have a very solid chance to take Ohio.

"Historically, Americans generally held campaign promises sacred..." I wonder when Sirota wrote that whether he was simply looking for an interesting rhetorical intro or whether he really believes it. Campaign promises have never been held sacred in the country. Look at Woodrow Wilson's campaign for re-election based on keeping us out of World War I, LBJ's campaign promises about Vietnam in 1964, Nixon's "secret plan" to end the Vietnam war or Eisenhower's promises about Korea. Campaign promises are glibly made and quickly broken. When they are broken there are rarely consequences. Sirota is either ignorant or cynically manipulative by introducing his attack on Obama that way. Either way, it was a dumb way to start an article which doesn't get much better as it goes along.

A bureaucracy now exists with a huge staff and procedures in place. Its chief preoccupation, from now on, will be to justify its existence and encourage its expansion. To do that it has to be visible. To that it has to cover its ass by taking extreme measures to prevent extremely unlikely sceanarios from taking place. I fear that the TSA will be with us for a long, long time completely independent of its efficency or the seriousness of the threat of airborne terrorism. Such is the nature of bureacracy.

The problem here is that prosecutors often develop a sports comptetion mentality. Frequently they don't care about justice so much as about winning. Uncomfortable with what the students are doing, interfering with her win/loss record, the prosecutor is lashing out with one of the only weapons she has available. She probably doesn't care about the legal merits of her actions but wants to teach them a lesson for intruding into her game and making her life more difficult.