William Jennings Bryant.

I don't have a problem with the gold standard but there are issues. It won't prevent fiscal chicanery on the part of the gang of 535 and it does pose problems in a world where the US dollar is the reserve currency. Getting rid of the Fed would be sheer stupidity. Granted, they have failed to act appropriately in a number of instances but not having a central bank is much worse than having one that screws up every so often.

I realize that hard data going back to the 19th century is hard to come by but anecdotal evidence available in histories about the consequences of money issued by banks suggests that a lot of people lost a lot of money on worthless paper (hence the preference for specie (which we wouldn't have enough of to go around anyway)). Plus, I doubt anybody is considering the chaos that would ensue when the Fed no longer ran clearinghouses for interbank transactions (such as when I pay you from my bank and you want to put that money in your bank) or the problems that would arise when your transactions came as US dollars, Morgan-Stanley Yuan, and Citi Corp Rials.

What you say about race and who is being harried for steroid use is probably true. Unfortunately, I concluded long ago that fairness and balance were qualities that were vanishing in American discourse. Everything has to be black or white. Shades of gray have no place in this world and are to be ignored.

The real story is the report itself. First is it's existence at all and second is what the report itself is.

Steroids are bad. Weeeell, yes they are. If used outside of medical controls, these substances, which the body produces itself naturally, can and will do bad things to you. So far, it sounds like a player who chooses to use steroids is building long term physical trouble for themselves. Also, it sounds like a personal problem, not a national one.

But wait you say. These are performance enhancers. They will give the player an unfair advantage. Huh? What - you think that baseball is an athletic contest like the Olympics? First of all, baseball is entertainment. It is not an athletic contest like the Olympics.

In the Olympics you have individual athletes competing against each other to see who is the best on that particular day. In baseball you have a bunch of teams competing to see which team can make the most money for their owners.

In the Olympics, someone using performance enhancing drugs might well have an advantage over his competitors and the advantage would be unfair. Baseball is about teams. Many teams have had stand out players and yet not made it to the playoffs, much less the series (The Red Sox, one of my teams, has had stand out players for decades, Ted Williams and Carl Yastremski come to mind immediately as well as many others, but it wasn't until they played my other team, the St. Louis Cardinals, with a team that had no stand out players of the caliber of Williams or Yastremski, that they won (it was a horrible series for me)). Go figure.

So is steroid use in baseball cheating? Not in my opinion. Plus, leaving aside the personal price that a steroid using player will pay, I would argue that they're good for baseball. A performance enhanced player will be more entertaining for the fans, thus bringing more fans into the stadium, thus making more money for the owner. Everybody wins except for the poor bastard that thinks he needs to use steroids. If you want to ban steroids in baseball, do it on humanitarian grounds, not on fairness grounds.

The other story is that the Mitchell report demonstrates that the legacy of that scumbag senator from Wisconsin, Joe McCarthy, is alive and well today. Using McCarthy's playbook - shadowy informants who have an axe to grind, ignoring virtually every rule of evidence, and violating virtually every judicial norm - Mr. Mitchell has smeared any number of players. Great. That's just the sort of thing I want to see us doing. The only good thing to come out of this (sortta) is that Bud Selig is going to punish those players identified in the report. Wonderful! Let the lawsuits begin! This oughta be great theater because, other than the fact that some baseball players use steroids, the Mitchell report doesn't prove a goddamn thing.

A lion may rend your body but only a woman can steal your soul.

And all you have to do is be able to look at her for her to do that.

However, that's not the point of this post. Your Iranian cleric reminds me of an interaction that occurred at my work 20 years ago. One of the group, a tallish slender young man of the fundamentalist Christian persuasion by the name of Mike was ranting on about the bible. It obviously wasn't the hajib but some other fruitcake thing in the bible about women (so it was obviously Old Testament). At some point, Rich, also known as His Immenseness - a huge man and Jewish, turns on him and towering over him said: "Mike, don't you realize that the bible was written by a bunch of old men to keep the women in line?"

The denouement of this little tableau has Mike's jaw flapping around his ankles and the rest of us collapsed in our chairs laughing so hard we're crying. All fundamentalists, regardless of flavor or persuasion, are, in the words of the 1891 US Army manual, a sly and crafty bunch that bear careful watching.

because they advocate the sort of constitutional/civil liberties positions that Ron Paul has been advocating. The democrats and republicans are both a bunch of liberals. By which I mean believers that the government should be large and directing society as opposed to government should be small and let society just get on with it.