If there were voting enabled on this thread, ala Fark, I'd pick 9-11 as the top scandal, worse even than the 2000 election theft, but barely. The August memo, yes, and also the suppression of calls within the FBI to investigate the flight training stuff.

One in four Iraqi's has had a family member murdered in the last three years.

See, this is good news -- for three out of four Iraquis. The glass is more than half full!

On the other hand, every time someone else gets killed or flees the country, that makes your odds of being the next victim go up.

I don't hate her. I just don't care. There were some good passages in Bird By Bird, but my life's too short to read Christian books. I don't hate Christians, I'm just not interested in their particular fairy tale.

I was on my way to Brazil last Monday and saw the reports all day in airports on CNN. This came the day after a dog killed all our chickens (I am not equating the two). I wept off and on all day. Even wept when Roger Maris hit a home run on the in-flight movie. I'm back home now, and this is the first intellegent thing I've seen on my return. Of course, I work in local bioterrorism mitigation planning, so I'm surrounded by the cult of fear every day, but this was the first reasonable thing I've heard since I got home. Thanks.

I have no problem accepting the notion that there may be some conscious or unconscious racial bias in officiating. Another factor, however, could be this: the coaches might be more likely to assign black players to guard the better offensive players on the other team, and because those opposing players are faster and handle the ball more and drive the lane more, the black defenders tend to foul more than their white teammates who draw easier defensive assignments.

I have no idea whether this is true, but it's worth considering. This would not explain why white and black officials call the game differently, but it might address the higher foul rates by black players. So perhaps there is a bias (conscious or unconscious) by coaches, who either give the black players a tougher assignment in order to favor white players, or because they perceive the black players to be better defenders. Or maybe the black players are better defenders, and the white players are slower and can't jump. But if the white players were slower, they'd have to foul more because they would be more likely to be out of position and grab or try to reach from behind. It gets complicated, doesn't it?

When I said I have no problem accepting racial bias in officiating, I meant that I find the study believable. I did not mean I find racial bias tolerable. I don't. Just clarifying.

I was never impressed by the supposed foreign policy genius of Ms. Rice. Perhaps it's just nerves, but her voice has always sounded to me like it had a bit of a tightness in the throat like she was in over her head. If she was W's tutor on geopolitical strategy, I guess I'd have to say, fair or not, judge the teacher by her student. Or maybe she's an expert on Cold War and Russia, but even there, it sure took W a long time to wiff the KGB-totalitarian stench on Putin.

The shame of it is that a good man like Colin Powell was used for a bad cause when he told the UN about the WMD "evidence," but a second-rate a$$-kisser like Condi is still at State, in Powell's place, sleepwalking through the abject destruction of USA's credibility and the great opportunity to be a leader for the good of humanity post-Cold War.

Ruben, you da bomb, bro!

was the perfect campaign song -- it said Boomers, it said enough of backward-looking Reagan/Bush, let's look ahead to a better future, etc. The whole idea of campaign theme songs should have been retired after 1992 because there will never be another one so spot-on perfect.

I catch a bit of Sean Hannity on the radio if I'm on my way to an afternoon meeting. What an idiot. His intro songs include Bruce Hornsby (Deadhead) and another by some Country woman singer that goes "let the weak be strong, let the right be wrong, make the guilty pay, it's Independence Day." It's about a woman leaving her man. It's against the patriarchy, it says let the Right be wrong, it totally goes against his support of the status quo Repub-Male-Rich power oligarchy.

I agree that pro cycling has deteriorated into farce. I am not just an uninformed go-USA NASCAR-NFL loving yahoo either -- here comes the obligatory claim of expert status -- I have been a member of U.S. track and field teams for going on 29 years in the demanding endurance sport of race walking (still competing on the national level against kids 25 years younger) and I have quite a bit of first- and second-hand knowledge about how pervasive performance-enhancing methods are in track, cycling and other Olympic sports, dating back to my time living in the dorm at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs in 1982 on the same floor as the cyclists.

It would be naive to believe with all your heart that any Tour winner in the last 30 years was clean. Furthermore, while the strongest man generally wins, the races certainly are staged like wresting to some extent. Recall, for instance, when Lemond was the fittest guy in the peleton but things were set up for his team leader Hinault, and Lemond wasn't allowed to win until it was certain that Hinault could not. There are rules and enforcers within the peleton to ensure that riders follow the scripts.