He seemed almost broken to me. His voice raspy, his eyes watery, his affect exhausted, his facial expression almost bewildered. I thought I would feel angry; but I found myself verging toward pity.

The case was so weak, the argument so thin, the evidence for optimism so obviously strained that one wondered whom he thought he was persuading.

And the way he framed his case was still divorced from the reality we see in front of our nose: that Iraq is not, as he still seems to believe, full of ordinary people longing for democracy and somehow stymied solely by "extremists" or al Qaeda or Iran.   more »

Why do adolescent boys masturbate

furiously and adolescent girls don't?

That might go some way

to explaining the male mindset

The female mindset seems to be one

of pleasuring/gratifying men by arousing them

Maybe female desire is to be desired

   more »

Hillary's BandwagonIs the Democratic nomination already Hillary's? Could be. In some ways, it's a pretty simple calculation.

She began with the support of the Democratic establishment, at least a third of primary voters, a big advantage with women, who make up the majority of these voters, and by far the most experienced campaign organization.

Though she's been - rather amazingly - out-fundraised a bit by Barack Obama's campaign, she's got all the dough she needs.   more »

We Americans take a lot of medical narcotics,

but that's only because

we're in a lot of pain these days

Is it surprising?

We have dumb, embarrassing leaders,

a vapid, pompous public debate,

and a reckless, destructive foreign policy

   more »

The Nazis were not the only historical example

of a group claiming the right to dominate others

based on ancestry, birth or blood

U.S. law uses the concept today to justify

the exclusion of millions of people in the US

non-citizens, or even worse,

those it defines as “illegal immigrants”

   more »

Thank you Jive Records, MTV, Clear Channel and members of Congress for the opportunity to present my assessment of Britney Spears' career. Which, according to nearly every objective metric, is going completely, totally awesome.

Sure, progress made over the last few months has been uneven -- the number of Star magazine "not normal" incidents is still disturbingly high -- but we are hitting most of our major benchmarks.

To wit, not only has there not been one single divorce this year, there also haven't been any marriages, significantly curtailing the assessed threat of divorce.   more »

No amount of jiggery-pokery could obscure the truth: Bush has no strategy to end his disastrous war and no strategy for containing the chaos he unleashed.

Last night’s speech could have been given any day in the last four years — and was delivered a half-dozen times already.

Despite Mr. Bush’s claim that he was offering a way for all Americans to “come together” on Iraq, he offered the same divisive policies — repackaged this time with the Orwellian slogan “return on success.”   more »

Self-Interest, Selfishness & Individualism

The narrow definition of freedom

is "giving people the ability

to get whatever they want"

This has become the central political

idea of the past 25 years,

but it's a corrosive form of pessimism

rooted in a bleak, simplistic

view of human nature

   more »

World public opinion has just been treated to the face-off of the year - as if orchestrated, with impeccable timing, in a John Woo movie.

On the Washington side is General David Petraeus, 54, the top US commander in Iraq, the Teflon general or, critics would argue, the iPod general, as he only plays the iTunes playlist selected by his owner, the White House.

On the Hindu Kush mountainside, possibly between Chitral in Pakistan and Kunar province in Afghanistan, arguably in a cave with broadband and video-production facilities, is Sheikh Osama bin Laden, 50, al-Qaeda leader and (still) the most wanted man in the world   more »