Don't fall for the father's trap. Instead invite the parents and the brother to the gay wedding or some similarly obviously open-minded celebratory event. If they come, then they deserve a break. If they don't there is no guilt and screw 'em.

I have no doubt the dems will win a lot of seats in exit polls in November. The question is whether the official vote counts will also win these seats. I'll go on record now: they will not. I would love to be proved wrong.

He hit the nail on the head. We are not in an era of conservative versus liberal. It is American versus un-American. Buch, Bin Ladin, Saddam. All the same scumbag who hates freedom and Aemrica. Lets keep banging that drum.

Mozell may be right that moral clarity is good. I wish he had not gotten the last word and could have put state-sponsored toture under that perspective.

The futures market says the dems do have an edge:

http://www.fortnow.com/senate/

Michael-- the point is not that the young republicans are idiots (you are allowed at 18-22) but that they are the scum of the earth if they do not put their money where their mouth is. Like their traitorous counterparts in the White House, they are cowards and should be reminded of that 24-7 until they either join the infantry or shut their hypocritical mouths. The only flaw of the strip is that it limits itself to that demographic-- any war supporter under 40 should enlist or shut up.

I teach college-level mathematics to engineers. Even these preselected nerds are not very practiced at analytical thinking. Sudoku is all about that, and has a hige range of difficulty. As has been pointed out, it is math (logic) but is not arithmetic. They have my daughter doing it in school as part of math (bravo school system). The hardest ones are a real struggle and require complicated logic. What is most interesting to me about it is that many people who "can't do math" can do quite complicated Sudoku puzzles because nobody told them it is math! So having so many Americans of all ages suddenly doing something analytic cannot be a bad thing. As for crosswords, they are cool too. Anything that gets the brain moving that is also popular has to be a good thing. Would you rather all were reading People Magazine?

This cartoon sums up nicely why I am against Hillary. I will of course vote for her should she win the primary. But even if I liked her as a leader, I would be against her for tactical reasons. Here is the summary from

http://www.pollingreport.com/wh08gen.htm

For head-to-head matchups on popular vote:

Hillary: 48-54% depending on opponent

Obama: 46-55% depending on opponent

Edwards: 53-60% depending on opponent

Obviously electoral vote analysis would be more meaningful, but when you factor in Republican fraud and the attack machine, we need the biggest margin of error we can get. The numbers above are +/- 3% by the way, which means Hillary could range 51-57% and Edwards could range 50-57% but the chances of that are quite small (much much less than 1%).

Finally, I have recently switched from Obama to Edwards based on the Iowa debate. Edwards is the only candidate that seems like he understands the core message of Krugman's most recent book, and he seems to have improved his rhetoric substantially since the early season (two Americas... blah blah blah).

Whether or not Larry Summers' claims were true about girls and math (I have not fact checked them), let's at least get them right-- your link to a former article does not note that its claims are bogus (as the letters in response point out-- you should read them and stop linking to that bogus article or refute the responses such as this one). What Summers claimed was that girls' math abilities had less variance. He did not say they had a lower mean or median.

And as to pay going down when girls flock to a major-- that is what happens when the largest demographic in college flock to a major. Lets not confuse correlation and causation. One hypothesis is sexism, and one is supply and demand. Assuming it is sexism is just as vapid as paying a woman lower because she is a woman, and that type of pseudo-science should be on Fox, not Salon.