... though I fear he will. I'd rather see someone like Joseph Stiglitz put in charge of Treasury, someone with the cred (two Nobel prizes in economics), experience (chair of Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers, head of the World Bank) and the smarts (he has strongly criticized the IMF and the neoliberal consensus on globalization) to take those guys on. If not that, then give him the CEA job again.

If we only consider monogamous, heterosexual, consensual sex acts, then it should be clear that men and women engage in exactly the same total number of such acts, and always have. That's because each such act requires one man and one woman. There's no catching up to be done.

It's kind of funny, really. During the campaign, the Republicans claimed that Obama was a dangerous socialist, the most liberal member of the Senate, yet the public voted for him overwhelmingly. If this were true, then clearly the liberals have a mandate: the public voted for the dangerous socialist.

On the other hand, during the campaign, David Sirota pointed out Obama's centrist tendencies and attacked Obama for them. So the truth is in between.

However, Obama did make some specific campaign promises. He promised, repeatedly, to support card check, to make it easier for unions to organize. He's obligated to keep that promise. Likewise, he promised health care reform; this is another obligation. He promised to get our troops out of Iraq over 16 months. We need to help him keep those promises by pressuring Congress, as well as the Obama administration, to move on those promises.

This is consistent with Obama's identity as a centrist because the true center, the one you get by finding the median positions of the American people, is to the left of what the pundits call centrism. Pro-choice is the majority position of the American people, so being pro-choice is centrist. Likewise for being against the Iraq war.

Cecil Adams of "The Straight Dope" has the details:

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2478/did-john-f-kennedy-really-write-profiles-in-courage

Even if JFK is taken at his word, he credits Sorenson in the preface as his "research associate". Obama had no such assistance.

... we have a single, possibly flawed study that indicates that eating GM corn may have negative health effects. Certainly that's cause for further study, and there's good reason to be skeptical, but what to do in the meantime? The right answer, I think, is that we avoid feeding it to our kids until we know with more confidence whether the effect this study showed is real or not. If this negatively impacts Monsanto's business model, too bad; their products aren't entitled to an innocent-until-proven-guilty standard.

George H.W. Bush killed the Iran-Contra investigation by basically pardoning everyone, so anyone that the special prosecutor could reasonably prosecute had a pass. Congress dropped its investigation too. Then those people came back and took senior positions in the Bush II administration, where they brought us torture.

Obama's a nice bipartisan guy who isn't inclined to launch lots of investigations or prosecutions of the Bushies. But if he doesn't, all those people will come back into the next Republican administration, and they'll come back emboldened: after all, they basically got away with murder. There's nothing that they won't do then.

People who think that letting bygones be bygones is a serious option will pay for it. The Republicans will regain power at some point; they'll be back. That is, they'll be back unless they are permanently discredited, by exposing what they did and punishing the perpetrators.

Buy now and save some oil while it's cheap. If volume purchases put upward pressure on prices, so be it.

A gasoline tax increase, offset with other tax cuts, would be a good idea as well.

You write: "I AM autistic, I am NOT self-diagnosed, and autism (in my case, Asperger's Syndrome) has had a pervasive effect on my life,"

No, you aren't autistic, because Asperger's is not autism, even if it's related.

My daughter's been diagnosed with Aspberger's, and based on discussions with therapists we've seen with her, I would get the same diagnosis, and so would about half the programmers in Silicon Valley. It's just part of normal human variation, and if anything it can actually help you succeed in many domains. Bill Gates is probably an Aspie. So are many successful, happily married people.

Stop making excuses.

... because the Republicans in the lame-duck Congress can block the bill, so it has no chance of passage. We'll have to wait until Jan. 20 to get this one reversed, unfortunately.

Based on my experience with technical conferences, there do seem to be significant numbers of Italian women in technology professions, probably a larger fraction than in the US (a much larger fraction if Asian immigrants and their children are excluded).

Then again, those Italian professors, engineers and grad students certainly do work hard to look good. They face a double challenge of meeting both the professional standards and the standards for what an Italian woman should look like.

The NY Times style section has, for years, been written for the snooty rich. It's full of articles about problems that even the upper middle class doesn't have, like how to deal with all the guests who want to summer with you in the Hamptons, or buying a fashionable Manhattan apartment as a second home. To those writers, a surrogate kid mothered by a working-class spare womb is just another fashion accessory. Most of those articles are just fantasy material for anyone whose net wealth isn't well into the seven digits.

The only mistake they made is that they made it more blatant than usual, and I wouldn't be surprised if someone tweaked up that factor deliberately.

... then he won't do the appointment on the basis of nepotism. Caroline Kennedy has been suggested as Hillary's replacement, but if her name weren't Kennedy, no one would consider an attorney and author who has never held elective office as a credible candidate for the US Senate.