They aren't even charcoal. They're waste products from petroleum refining, so not only is this item about something ordinary and long-known but its come-on line is bizarrely off-kilter.

He seems to have said exactly what he meant: that a presidential run had to begin very early, and that it wasn't fun for him.

And when did Hillary Clinton begin running? And when did John McCain? And WHO CARES?

Your Buddha is laughing because your life has gotten out of hand. You rely on too many mechanisms to prop up an unbalanced lifestyle. Remember the Zen saying: grind beans, boil water.

Your Buddha is also disintegrating because you are, in your own way, following another Zen precept: If you meet the Buddha, kill him.

How can she say this stuff with a straight face? Nothing will happen this summer unless she has introduced legislation. Can the president even order taxes to be changed? I doubt it, taxation is the Congress's prerogative. So she's talking about stuff she can't do even next year and pretending it's an urgent task to be done before Memorial Day.

Assuming that she's serious and a bill is really in the works, Clinton is trying to rally Congress around her with this stunt. In fact, I could argue that she's making common cause with Republicans (at least with McCain) to strike a coup upon Obama. I suppose if I were Pelosi and Reid I would not be happy with her, but presidents are never chums with their former congressional colleagues. She's burning bridges with this move, if she's truly trying to get a bill through Congress before summer.

is that Clinton really HAS put on Rocky's robe, she really HAS learned from the Bush lesson: voters admire people when "you know where they stand." She's working on the stiff neck, the pugnacious attitude. She's ready to step into George Bush's cockpit and start working those levers of power. Got a template for her signing statements and everything.

I don't like it, and that's what Obama means by Washington politics. But her strategy has arguments behind it. Of course Kristol approves of it.

This "scientific study" is an unreviewed, interim "working paper" that is little more meaningful than somebody's blog post.

Remember, Cheney's chief of staff? Congress is hauling his ass before a House committee to answer questions about how the administration decided it was OK to torture people.

In other words, how are opponents going to react if all the states with initiatives have already enacted (or rejected) same-sex marriage bans? What will they do, ban it twice?

When he should have said "sporadic"?

I think we could start calling him "McSpaz" now.

Simon Winchester has lost whatever touch he had. His Map that Changed the World was panned by historians of science, and he jumped the shark with his Crack in the Edge of the World, a howler-filled hoard of unintegrated bits gleaned from secondary sources. It is no surprise to me that all he can muster in profiling Joseph Needham is chainsmoking nudism and similar effluvia. Far more useful is geophysicist Kenneth Hsu's retirement essay, "Why Isaac Newton Was Not a Chinese," linked from my signature. Hsu blames Confucianism and its respect for "loyalty, constancy, gratitude":

I have a friend who is a fundamentalist. Accepting literally what is written in the Bible, he concluded that Jesus was either the Christ, or a liar. Since his Sunday-school teachers told him that the latter is unacceptable, he saw no alternative to the orthodox Christian creed. On the eve of my "conversion" to new geology, I was facing the same dilemma. How could my teacher, the person whom I loved and respected, be utterly wrong? How could I continue to love and respect him if I was to be convinced that he was wrong? I did not explore a possible alternative that Jesus was neither Christ nor a liar.

Obama said he'd meet with the rulers of Iran, not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. I wish you guys would stop repeating that crap. Ahmadinejad rules Iran like GW Bush ran Texas when he was governor.

This person who's been "ready on Day 1" and "ready to be commander-in-chief" and "ready for that 3 a.m. call" keeps sticking her foot in her mouth, over and over again. Of course she didn't call for Obama to be shot. The Obama campaign deploring her remark was an offsides foul. But all that aside, she showed a tin ear and an appallingly poor sense of history in bringing up 1968 and the second Kennedy assassination to bolster a trivial assertion. I've had enough of presidents, and presidential candidates, with insufficient presence of mind.

Enjoy your hour in the TV lights.

It's consternation, exasperation, and disillusionment.

I came in just to help rack up the letters count, but this last comment amused me:

"If Hillary does not get the Democratic nomination, I will sit out this years election. It's the only way my voice will be heard."

She keeps trying to play the Happy Warrior and hope that the delegates will pick her after Obama fails. This RFK reference is one telltale sign. The next one would be if she starts saying she's "pleased as punch," then we can be sure she's channeling Hubert Humphrey.

Blind loyalty to a church is no more becoming than blind loyalty to anything else. And if Trinity has become more trouble than it's worth to him, by all means he should vote with his feet. It's not a virtue to stick around a place you don't like just because it's Christian--there are a hundred other perfectly good ways to be Christian.

If his church has become a de facto religious test (i.e. disqualification) for the presidency, thanks to the busybody press and public, then Obama owes it to the Constitution to walk away.