I can donate to any school I want, but since when can I earmark the money to pay someone's salary the way this anonymous donor did? I couldn't donate to a school and insist that my favorite professor or department chair be given a raise, right?

Since when? Since forever. That's how all those named "chairs" are created. I kid you not, Stanford has a "Yahoo! Founders Professorship" in engineering. You can have anything you want done with the right amount of money. Want a new department created at your local university? Go speak with development (they'll take your call) and ask. They will give you a number immediately.

New chairs at my university start at $2.5 million in the humanities and go up from there. For $3 million I am sure Cal would appoint a King Kaufman Professor of Sabremetrics to their math department.

I spend hours every week working with various endowed funds to insure that we are spending the money exactly as the endowment dictated. This pot can only support undergraduate research in European history. That pot can only support domestic travel to conferences and archives for graduate students in American history. Another is specifically allotted to support underrepresented minorities working on issues related to peace and social justice. It's a pain, but we're happy for the money.

Case in point from a recent NY Times article:

"When John Sexton, the president of New York University, first met Omar Saif Ghobash, an investor trying to entice him to open a branch campus in the United Arab Emirates, Mr. Sexton was not sure what to make of the proposal — so he asked for a $50 million gift. It’s like earnest money: if you’re a $50 million donor, I’ll take you seriously,” Mr. Sexton said. “It’s a way to test their bona fides.” In the end, the money materialized from the government of Abu Dhabi, one of the seven emirates.

If you listen to recordings of Churchill, he has a terrible voice and a pronounced lisp. "We shall fight them on the beech-thes, we shall fight them on the sthores... We shall never thurrender!"

In fact, it is so disconcerting to listen to that one has to really pause and wonder how he inspired people in the same way when you watch film of Hitler you think "why didn't he seem crazy to the people in the audience?"

Different traditions, different technologies, different cultural expectations all play a part in this. Reducing this to some universal love of a deep voice is sophistic (like almost all commentary published in this country).

Doesn't that op-ed read like a cover letter for an application for the job of VP? If McCain wants to tack to the right, he will pick a hardline evangelical. If he thinks he has that electorate in the bag, he could tack to what is considered 'moderate' in Republican circles and ask Bloomberg.

I hope Obama (if, he is the nominee) doesn't think this is a good idea.

well, she sure as hell ain't going to the white house.

Do they really use corded phones still in the white house? I think we need an upgrade.

To answer your question HRC, I want Obama answering that phone every day and twice on Sundays. Every step that woman takes makes me send more money to Obama.

You Lefties here all SAY you support the working class, but when one voices a legitimate complaint, he gets slapped down by the man.

King, I don't think you underdstand how important respect is in the hood in which Fielder grew up in. Where he's from, if you don't roll with force, you're lost.

For example, take this one time back in '96 when he was living on Park Ave while his dad played for the Yankees... well to make a long story short, his limo driver got held up in traffice on the Major Deegan and didn't have time to clean the car before picking him up. It was covered in road salt and all the other kids (and their nannies!) made fun of him.

He vowed he would never be disrespected again and that is what has made him the man he is today.

Excellent. Clinton supporters continue to show that they care more about their candidate than the party by taking another page out of Karl Rove's playbook. Namely, any time you can, put an "ista" at the end of a Democratic leaning group (right all you Salonistas?) and try to discredit them by making people connect them semi-subliminally with the Sandinistas. I guess they figured it worked well to demonize their DLC centrist compatriots are radical lefties when the right wing noise machine called them "Clintonistas, so why not use it against Obama.

Never mind that not 1 in 5 Americans can correctly identify the country in which they were located and not 1 in 100 could explain the dynamics of Nicaraguan politics in the 1980s. It doesn't matter. Reagan's footsoldiers did their work well and people KNOW even if they don't know why that Sandinista = communist = bad.

I guess it probably has the added advantage of sounding Spanish too. Lots of scary people speak Spanish you know. Boo!

For someone who is allegedly so smart, she certainly is running a terrible campaign appealing to the lowest common denominator.