The Wingnuts and Tin Foil Hat brigade are starting the year with a vengeance! I wish they would take up drinking, get hung over and s;eep in.

In The Guardian today, Michael Tomasky takes on the premise of a "post-partisan" Bloomberg boomlet. He says some old, retired senators, aghast at the state of their beloved institution, can't plausibly argue that blame for policies over the last seven years must be shared equally in order to hoist a unity banner this year.

"But they horribly misdiagnose the current problem of partisan gridlock. Their approach assumes that America is in this condition because 'both sides' are equally culpable. This is nonsense. Republicans and conservatives are responsible for about 80 percent of the problem.

Only one side tried to politicize 9/11. On one side scheduled a war vote for a month before an election. Only one side ran a television ad that visually equated a man who left three limbs in Vietnam with Saddam Hussein. Only one side impeached a president over oral sex. Only once in American history has a sitting Senate party leadership personally gone into the home state of the other party and campaigned against him: Republican Bill Frist, in 2004, against Tom Daschle."

"I'm not running for president. What I am trying to do is help us get an independent approach to government." - New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg during a New Year's Eve interview in Times Square with NY1 cable news station.

http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2008/01/01/ap4484391.html

There you have it, for what it's worth. Will this need to be parsed for tense, etc.? Up to you.

There is a potential to an annual tradition really...

guarantee

A Bloomberg run would guarantee a Republican win. There's no question about it.

-- saintzak

Like a red headed step child.

No Republican is gonna see the inside of the WH, without an invitation, for years.

I think Paul Dirks was calling Ron Paul either a liar or a moron because Ron Paul was making the dishonest or moronic claim that he doesn't know how 'theory' is defined in regards to the 'theory' of evolution. ...

Paul Dirks can answer for himself; he does not need a mindless little kid like you to try to think.

Why do you not write Margulis and tell her that Darwin was absolutely correct and therefore she should retire and give back all the awards?

I mean -- hell fire --- she had the nerve to subtitle Symbiotic Planet as A New View of Evolution!!

Give her hell little one!

Will this need to be parsed for tense, etc.? Up to you.

The term derives from the Sherman pledge, a remark made by American Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman when he was being considered as a possible Republican candidate for the presidential election of 1884. He declined, saying "If drafted, I will not run; if nominated, I will not accept; if elected, I will not serve."

But he has no base. The GOP can't run anyone because they don't have anyone who is electable. It's a field of stiffs.

An ex-Democratic Jew mayor from NYC? What are you people smoking?

I rarely go to the front page of the WaPo. Instead I have four links that take me to specific writers. No eyeballs of mine will touch Broder - if I can help it. One of the direct links I have is to Shankar Vedantam's Department of Human Behavior. His column Monday, Vote Your Conscience If You Can, was an interesting read. Not terribly reassuring if you're "for" a particular candidate, however.

If you google "saltation", the third entry from the top is "Farting through my fingertips".

From the viewpoint of someone who, over the course of years working in the field of clinical microbiology has seen the damage done by the selective mutation of bacteria to more resistant forms, I'd have to say that sounds about right.

We can argue til the cows come home about the wherefore's of these things, but the fact remains, if we don't succeed in keeping up with the evolution of such organsims as Methicillin Resistant Staph aureus (MRSA) and multi-drug resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MDRTB), then evolution will have succeeded in finding one more way to rid the planet of our sorry selves, irrespective of how long it took us to evolve.

Has anyone else noticed that Hillary has been saying some interestingly astute things about foreign policy lately? (I'm thinking specifically about the comments on the situation in Pakistan as reported by Juan Cole, but there've been others that have caught my eye in the past week, even though I can't place them at the moment.)

Before anyone's big, angry feet land on me, though -- especially those of anyone surnamed Pauliac, -- I'm not pimping for Hillary; I just welcome any utterance from any candidate which even briefly seems to escape from behind the campaign's smiling platitudes, yet isn't at the same time evidence of some sort of ideological monomania which I don't share. (Now you can jump, RP supporters.)

I beleive that the Universe operates in a "lawful" manner and that the tools of science are valid ways of discovering the nature of those laws. While their may be wiggle room in various scenario's concerning the rates of change (steady on a genetic level vs rapidily on a speciation level), the basic premise of evolution is as thoroughly based in fact as is the basic premise of gravity or entropy.

Anyone who puts effort into casting doubt on these premises is doing so out of either ignorance or dishonesty and in our current political environment, the dishonesty is pretty high on the list.

As such, "belief in evolution" is a pretty good one-up indicator of a belief in rationality. I don't know about you, but I have a significant degree of difficulty trusting someone who isn't rational. And trust me, it isn't a short list.

But then again, I'm arguing with someone who called WT a warmonger.

Paul Dirks can answer for himself; he does not need a mindless little kid like you to try to think.

-- bucky1

This board is not and never will never be a PRIVATE MESSAGE board, where no one is allowed or able to interject an opinion into a conversation.

Bucky1 will apparently never stop being a flippin' weirdo with a penchant for calling people he disagrees with "little". So strange.

Thank you. I love it when scientists show their wry side. Is it that bucky sees a malevolent conspiracy everywhere? I mean he does seem to read an awful lot, and he ain't stupid, but the way he pieces things together baffles me. (And bucky, forgive me for talking as though you weren't in the room, but talking to you directly makes me crazy.)