Spotted in Libe Café: a blonde be-Ugg-ed sister cleaving big time, distracting the docile, all-business evening coffee crowd from, well, everything.

On such a sloshy, wintry Tuesday, this girl’s chest was ostensibly on its milky way to exposing a bit of her caramel-colored niblets — and even in a sea of turtleneck-clad breasts that would make Joshua Hartnett proud, all eyes seemed to be fixated on the single plunging neckline.

Memo to girlfriend: there is an appropriate time and place to open up the valley to tourists. We don’t know exactly what that time and place is, but judging by the crowd’s reaction — this was not it.

Let’s address the “time” part first: didn’t your mother ever tell you to cover it up when it’s 27 degrees outside? Cold neck, meet scarf; cold chest, meet a sensibly cut top.   more »

Cultural expectations and

personal preferences reinforce each other

The hope that a wild session might

“reveal new things about myself” or

“allow me to act completely out of character”

is widely echoed in literature,

pop culture and drinking lore

   more »

Keywords: drinking, inhibition, loss, culture, binge, control, chaos

Imagine the Democrats hadn't saddled themselves with a byzantine system of proportional representation to allot delegates.

Suppose, instead, they had followed the winner-take-all system used by the Republicans and the country for November's general election.

No super-delegates, no "Texas two-step" of a primary followed by caucuses. In that case she, not he, would be ahead.

By my calculation, she would now have 1,738 delegates, and Obama only 1,541.   more »

The subprime mortgage meltdown caused banks on both sides of the Atlantic to write down some $400 billion (UBS puts the final banking-sector loss closer to $600 billion, which means scaling back lending by $2 trillion), and sent the dollar to an all-time low against the euro.

It also put 2 million U.S. homeowners at risk of losing their homes, countless millions of others of losing 30 percent of the value of their real estate in 2008, pushed oil over $100 a barrel, and gold to nearly $1,000 an ounce.

Harvard's Lawrence Summers, a former U.S. treasury secretary (1998-2001), said subprime spawned the most serious crisis in housing since the Depression.

Near worthless mortgage-backed securities were repackaged by greedy predatory operators to look like soul food for the brainless.   more »

It is hard to feel a lot of sympathy for Obama as he gets victimized by Hillary’s ability to pick up on the militaristic zeitgeist and portray herself as the better war chief.

I can’t count exactly how many times – I’ve heard Obama refer to the United States as “a nation at war.”

That word choice of his is problematic in two key ways. The first difficulty is that it is false.

Americans are not dodging IEDs, artillery shells, cluster bombs or even suicide bombers on the way to and from American workplaces, schools, shopping malls, and homes.   more »