Considering the Israeli government itself is very critical of the Iraq situation...

Of course they are! The invasion has been a horrible disaster, and Israelis are not protected from the consequences the way their American counterparts and Christian fundamentalist "supporters" are. Olmert's government wanted a follow-up against Iran, and that's now pretty much impossible. In fact, Iran is probably the only established state that has benefited from the calamity (al Quaeda and Kurdistan being the other big winners). So it's natural that Olmert should be (especially) critical.

But come on, Anonymous, are you seriously trying to claim that Olmert's criticism of the Iraq situation is anything other than ex post facto? Macho right-wing militance in Israel has always been self-defeating, but Israelis have cherished political illusions of their own and thus far they have not truly held Olmert to account for helping to make the bed in which Israel now finds itself (just as they could never bring themselves to hold his predecessors to account).

Supporting Israel means not burning everything down around it, and the sooner Israelis and Americans who truly wish Israel well (instead of fervently wishing for a bloody apocalypse) get their heads out of the sand and realize this the better.

The military has always had a peculiar relationship to truth in the public arena, but ultimately American military culture itself is largely apolitical, or at least tries to be. It's part of the soldier's notion of subordination to extra-military civic authority, and frankly I don't think we would want it any other way.

So the Pentagon takes its orders on press relations from the civilians in charge at the top. Whatever Bush, Sr's, failings, the military leadership that served under him was given relatively free rein in how truthful it could be about what was happening during the Gulf War. (It didn't hurt that it was a focused, successful short-term engagement with limited objectives. Imagine that!)

With the crooks currently in charge, of course, it's no surprise that we see a substantially different pattern. But let's not forget that, all the horseshit notwithstanding, some of the earliest, steadiest, and most vocal opposition to this administration's flawed security and military policies has been from the military establishment itself. Back when even many liberal Americans were still hoping for a "splendid little war", some of those guys were out there saying that we weren't headed anywhere good.

Let's listen better next time, okay?

... is that we have an accumulated cultural tradition of telephone conversations as profoundly private forms of communication. You sit in a booth, or an easy chair in your own home, or even in your bedroom, and (especially since switching systems all became automated and then computerized) it's just you and the other person. (And maybe the NSA.)

Mobile phones allow us to have our phone conversations in public, but they don't teach us how. So, Incommunicado, my own take is that your wife is reacting viscerally, as many people do, against the mutually contradictory conditions of "on the phone" and, say, "in the car" or "walking down the street." Like tourists faced with similar situations involving culture shock, she resorts to speaking loudly and not understanding what is said to her even when you're perfectly comprehensible. I bet she waves her arms around, too.

To my mind the solution is to find ways for her to connect the cellphone as an artifact with the patterns with which she's already comfortable. Maybe you could try only obliging her to use it when she's in "traditional" phone venues, and see if that makes a difference.

It's possible that will never work. But you're still young, and before either of you are truly too old to ever change the technology will have evolved yet again. Maybe it will work out next time around.

Blaming subprime lending for the housing crisis is like blaming Barry Bonds for steroid use in baseball.

The real cause is the removal of limitations on the ability of banks to resell their loans to the government mortgage insurance corporations. Once this happened (at the behest of the mortgage industry), banks stopped being accountable for the loans they made, and market forces that would naturally have curbed irrationally exuberant lending practices were no longer salient. The US government, and the people of America, will be left holding the bag if and when the bankruptcies and forclosures really start coming in.

Don't scapegoat lending at subprime rates, which is simply one of many symptoms of the disease. Find the people who set this system up and prosecute them, and then slap yourselves on the wrist, as citizens, for being asleep at the wheel for the past two decades.

Bloggers get the same bad rap that old-style journalists used to back when they were real journalists -- unkempt, cynical, disreputable, snarky, and so on. That probably bodes better for the blogging community than anything else.

The only real problem with bloggers is that they share their generation's overinvested faith in the power of desktop research. It's great and all, don't get me wrong, but op-ed and primary source aggregration are only part of what make a complete press. Sooner or later someone has to go places and build contacts and earn trust and interview people to get the original stories written up in the first place. That's boring and unglamorous and doesn't built hit count, but it's the true measure of a free press.

(To be fair, almost no real investigative reporting takes place within major American newsrooms anymore, so perhaps bloggers shouldn't be singled out for that.)