First, I am not sure how you claim to know that a substantial part of the audience didn't find this cover unfunny.

As soon as I can parse this, I'll have a response.

Let's see...I am claiming to know that a substantial part of the audience did not find the cover unfunny.

Or...I am claiming to know that a substantial part of the audience did find the cover funny

Is this what you are claiming I said? No wait, what you are saying is that you are not sure how I claim such a thing.

Well, I'll agree with that. I'm not sure how I claim such a thing either.

In any case, my issue is not with whether some people found the cartoon to be funny or not. My issue is with the people who, when confronted with a large number of others who find it unfunny respond by simply attacking their sense of humor, rather than talking about the art itself.

Seriously, who gives a damn what the article says? For every person who reads an article in the New Yorker, there are at least a hundred who see it on the sales rack and don't buy it.

For the most part, people don't read magazines. And yet they are still impacted by the covers that they see.

The McCain cartoon is not, in fact, on the cover of The National Review. Indeed, it suffers from the same problems that the Obama cartoon does - it seems hardly "ironic" at all.

But apparently the editors of The National Review are clever enough to not publish smear cartoons of their own preferred candidate on their cover, while the editors of The New Yorker are so self-absorbed that they have no feel for what would be taken as satire and what would simply be taken at face value.

The umps blew two baserunning calls in the top of the 11th. First, Kinsler was called out while stealing 2nd on a play where Tejada never tagged him. And then there was the play with Navarro at the plate.

In both cases, the umps had stationed themselves behind the player making the tag, so the shortstop and catcher, respectively, were between the umpire and the action. So in both cases, the umpires could have at best only a partial view of whether a tag was made or not.

The Kinsler call was particularly bad because Tejada simply never tagged him. As for the Navarro call, that is the typical kind of call umpires make when the ball is in place at a certain time, the umpires don't seem to care exactly where the tag happens. When a runner is tagged high on the chest, there is a good likelihood that his foot has already reached the plate.

MLB needs to instruct umpires to do a better job positioning themselves. Had the umpires not blown two calls in the 11th, the game would have been over much earlier.

Citation? Authors? When was it published?

Digging through the website...ah, there it is.

Actually, this article was originally published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Lydon et al., July 2008. "If-then contingencies and the differential effects of the availability of an attractive alternative on relationship maintenance for men and women."

I have no idea if there is any statistical significance to the numbers used. I suspect attention is being given to this paper solely because of its conclusions.

I don't think it should be considered shocking that men and women will, on average, behave differently given similar stimuli. Men and women are different, after all. It's the how and why that is of interest. And also very hard to pin down...

and I believe he'll manage to accomplish that.

(As long as we're playing along with the silly 'win/lose the war' narrative.)

to see the blind spot so many war supporters have to just how immoral, indeed reprehensible it is to launch an invasion of a sovereign nation while basing the justification of the war on a shifting pack of lies.

There is literally no moral difference between the American invasion of Iraq and the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. In both cases, a propaganda-driven invasion was justified by trumped-up allegations of the threat that the invaded country posed to the citizens of the invading country. Indeed, this is the trick that rulers have used time and time again over the centuries to convince their "spear carriers" (as Gore Vidal would put it) to invade and pillage some other nation which they ordinarily wouldn't give a damn about.

Several hundred thousand people in Iraq are dead.

By this act, the US lost any claim of moral superiority over China. Yes, China treats their prisoners poorly. But under Bush, so does the United States! Brilliant!

The chattering classes are burdened down by the cognitive dissonance resulting from their refusal to take responsibility for their own evil deeds.

Bringing up McCains flips is not a legitimate response to whether or not Obama's position is politically motivated.

Well, thank goodness somebody admits that opposing the war in Iraq carries political motivation with it. For years, we've been told that opposing the war at all was political suicide.

The implication of your comment is that the US should carry on fighting a war, even if it is politically unpopular. That is a dramatically undemocratic attitude to have, especially on a topic like war that has such a profound impact on so many people. If the bosses tell us we should fight, we should fight? Is that how it works?

I know that's how Bush would like the US to be. Of course he never felt any personal need to put his own neck on the line.