He signed on to the Arizona anti-gay referendum of 2006 and did ads for it. This proposal didn't just ban gay marriage. It prohibited any government recognition of domestic partnerships as well, and would have made it illegal to grant any government benefit to an unmarried couple. It was too extreme for Arizona voters; they rejected it.

He did oppose a federal anti-gay amendment.

... in the field (with few exceptions). Other economists belong to schools of thought and behave like ideologues, describing any behavior that does not fit their models as "irrational". The behaviorists, on the other hand, study what people actually do, and test their predictions by experiment.

It's not simply a matter of a political middle ground. It's a completely different approach, where you don't claim that a strategem will work without data to back it up. You don't rely on holy works, whether by Milton Friedman or Karl Marx.

... so you're concluding too much from just looking at two states.

... and your words would be seen as completely alien to any American libertarian back in the late 1990s. Remember when Clinton was in charge, and you guys were all worried about the repressive US government? How you talked about natural rights, and would hotly deny that you have rights by virtue of the government granting you rights, or because you are a citizen? You're an authoritarian thug, the very antithesis of a libertarian. You believe in raw power. You believe in crushing foreigners into the dust. Kill 'em all, let God sort it out.

The original American libertarian, Thomas Jefferson, once wrote: "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever."

Gitmo is filled with completely innocent people who were turned in for reward money in Afghanistan. It also has some very dangerous terrorists. The role of a trial is to ascertain who is who. If the OJ trial destroyed your faith in American justice, so be it, but if so you can no longer call yourself a libertarian.

Girls shoot up in height about two years earlier than boys do, and at age 12, the average girl is nearly two inches taller than the average boy.

Imagine if you could time-travel to mid-2002, and tell people that in 2008, the Democrats would nominate a man named Barack Hussein Obama, who (in 2002) was a relatively obscure Illinois state legislator with a Kenyan father, and that he would defeat Barack Obama. This would be considered too unbelievable to qualify even as fiction.

The conclusion is that eight or twelve years from now, it shouldn't be a shock if someone is nominated who we've never heard of, and if that person is from a background that we couldn't imagine. So the idea that a defeat for Hillary Clinton means no female president for generations is ludicrous.

We also need to get that individuals matter: Barack Obama is an amazing political talent, which is why he was able to come out of nowhere and narrowly defeat the Clintons. Somewhere out there we have any number of similarly talented women, currently holding local office. One of them may change the world, sooner than we think.

Whoops! "He would defeat Hillary Clinton", of course I meant to say.

He is implicitly launching a strong attack on the media for not doing their job, and they are defensive about this. You can expect to see all of the big network and cable people trying their hardest to make the book go away.

were what, exactly? He got George H.W. Bush's NAFTA enacted, and completed the GATT negotiations in much the same way that Bush Sr. would have. He got welfare reform passed. He ran a pro-Wall-Street Treasury department and presided over a boom that wasn't of his own making. He was a competent president and ran a competent government. But his administration's only lasting impacts were conservative changes and the loss of Congress to the Republicans.

In foreign policy moves, he involved the US in the various Yugoslav wars, but Bush Sr. would have done much the same.

All that said, he looks great compared to what came after.

... is that it's the same penalty the Republicans imposed. McCain will not be able to play on resentment among Florida and Michigan voters, if both parties wind up treating those voters exactly the same.

At this point, whether you like Clinton or Obama, it's time to think about how we're going to come together and beat John McCain in the fall. Continued intra-party warfare won't do that.

... and they arrived at the delegate allocation by considering not only the votes that counted, but also tens of thousands of rejected ballots (rejected because a lot of people wrote in Obama, and some wrote in Edwards, but these votes didn't count), as well as the exit polls.

Check out

http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/primaries/results/epolls/#MIDEM

and go to page 2. Find the question "Vote if All Candidates Were On Ballot". It turns out that some 18% of voters who preferred Obama voted for Clinton over "Uncommitted", and that Clinton would have gotten only 46%. The conclusion is that a fair allocation of the delegates that reflects the voters' will couldn't even give Clinton the delegates she won.

Despite that argument, given the tiny difference it would have been wiser, perhaps, to go with 73/55 (divided by two); the four-vote difference really doesn't matter. Even so, the Obama side was more generous than they had to be; they actually had a 14-13 majority to split Michigan 50/50, but decided that such a close vote would be divisive.

... that diesel costs a good deal less than gasoline in Europe. I'm sure that in part, this is because the tax structure is different, but that doesn't suffice to explain the large difference.

... the problem is that, throughout TV and the movies, the characters are almost always shown in digs that they could not possibly afford. This is especially true for anything that's set in Manhattan.