That's the only word I have to Joe "Fist Pump" Lieberman and Michael "Sun-tzu" O'Hanlon, and their ilk. They are hostile, paranoid, and delusional, as evidenced by O'Hanlon's thinking that he's at all qualified to write on the "science" of war. Sun-tzu, Caesar, Clauswitz all wrote books of the art of war, but they were all soldiers, all fought, and butchers that they were, they participated first-hand in their butchery. O'Hanlon? Lieberman? Not so much, but don't tell them that. Psychotics can get very violent when their delusional bubbles are punctured.

Of course, the problem is that they're very violent when their delusions aren't challenged anyway.

I'm surprised none of the armchair military geniuses out there have mentioned the Alexander Option. Have McChrystal marry as many daughters of the tribal leaders as it takes to get them to lay down arms and get the fuck out. One fallacious historical analogy is as good as any other, as far as I'm concerned.

Carthago delenda est.

Surely you meant "Tit for Twat" or "Clit for Twat"! You're just phoning it in anymore.

If enough people throw enough shit, eventually no one will notice the smell. I think that's what's happening to us.

Does anyone else see the parallels between our times and the 1840's and 1850's when we all sorts of nativist nastiness and other bits of assorted ugliness in politics and public life? Heck, even that sodomite Walt Whitman was a Know-Nothing!

The Bullies were the first ones to go running to teacher when the Bullied fought back, just like in basketball where the most egregious foulers are the same guys who fly sprawling and bawling through the air whenever there's some incidental contact.

To bad for us the the bullies are also the teachers, and the foulers are also the refs.

School board members are elected officials who set school policy (curricula, standards, contracts, budgets, behavior codes, etc.). (Tho' there may be a few school districts left where the position(s) is a political appointment.)

School administrators are professional educators who are hired by the school board to do the actual work implementing/enforcing policy and of running the schools.

A school board president is elected, re-elected, or loses re-election. A superintendent, supervisor, principal, or teacher is hired and fired.

A principal, then, is in no position to grant exceptions to any policy (tho' they have some leeway in interpretation depending on the temperment of his immediate superiors and the board). A school board president, on the other hand, while not in a position to grant a particular exception to a particular student (tho' a former president of ours did try to do just that for her son), can bring the case to the board for a final decision on whether the students broke the rules or if the rules can/should be changed.

I only bring all this up because I see a few posters confusing board members (politicians elected to office) with administrators (bureaucrats hired by the politicians).

(BWT - I use "politician" and "bureaucrat" in their denotative senses and without any of their negative connotations.)

Maybe I missed something in Harris' write-up, but what makes you think that the school board president is a leftie?

...Thinking that KK's picture here on Salon.com was a caricature!

How many LAST AND FINAL WARNINGS are you going to issue, friend? They're losing their effect. I mean, I only half pissed my pants this time. Maybe that's your secret strategery - issue empty threat after empty threat till your warnings have no alarming effect and we're all complacent in our mockery of you, and then it's BAM! WAM! Ninjas!

I think you're referring to the phenomenon known as Global Dimming which, 30 years ago, scientists thought would cause the Earth to cool. Basically, from 1950-1990, the amount of light reaching the Earth's surface lessened by about 4% (experiments in the Netherlands and Israel confirmed this). They believed this was caused by aerosol particles in the atmosphere which reflect light back into space. They didn't have direct evidence (i.e. temperature readings) that planet was cooling, but hypothesized that the Earth could cool because of the reduced amount of light reaching its surface. When actual temperature readings were made, it was discovered that the Earth was in fact warming, and we now know that this is due to greenhouse gasses.

The dimming trend has since reversed since the 1990's, possibly because most of the developed word (Western Europe, USA, Japan) has reduced its aerosol emissions. A few scientists who have studied by the Global Dimming phenomenon and Global Warming now worry that Global Dimming may have slowed Global Warming, and now that the phenomenon has abated, they worry that the rate of Global Warming will accelerate. There is at least one climatologist (whose name escapes me) who has proposed artificially inducing the dimming affect again as a stop-gap measure to slow Global Warming.

I'd like to note that the "discussion" that climate change critics claim they want to have about the issue has been going on in scientific circles for decades. The politicos, policy-makers, and public are the late-comers to the game.

It's good to see that in an increasingly complex and ever-changing world that the Sleazy DZ's (aka the Easy DZ's) are as simple (-minded) as ever.

I was envisioning Kirk Cameron, not James Cameron, when I read this story. Then I got to the part about DNA evidence "suggesting" that Jesus and Mary M. had a kid and I knew it was just my brain playing its Monday tricks on me.