This is more of the continung behavior of the current administration that leaves me with little respect for them. I can remember a time when I was disgusted with a fellow named Nixon while the rest of the world seemed to be giving him high marks. I was right then and there is plenty of evidence that I am right now.
Bush concluded 2002 with the same dishonesty that defined his economic policy throughout the year—a mendacity that ranged from denying the tax cut had anything to do with the re-emergence of the deficit to arguing that the terrorism insurance bill would create 300,000 construction jobs.

Dark matter may not be real. Our Newtonian physics may be wrong. A small tweak to the gravitational constant for gravity at very long distances may be all that's needed. Milgrom's adjustment accurately predicted how stars would move around in a galaxy before astronomers were able to measure their motions.

It occurs to me that this may also have implications for the attempts to detect the elusive gravity waves.

Move along folks,nothing new here.
Frist looks from afar like a decent, generous man with humanitarian instincts who doesn't always let decency, generosity, and humanitarianism get in the way of his ambition. ("A humanitarian who doesn't let it get in the way" might be the definition of a "compassionate conservative.") He won his seat from an incumbent Democrat by using TV commercials full of racial innuendo. Frist is undoubtedly a better person than his use of those commercials would suggest. Does that make them better or worse?

This is sad and in the end tragic if this is the best Islam has to offer to the world. I sure hope the world of Islam is able to get its act together and present a better face. If not, it will eventually be lost. Or they will plunge the world into the another Dark Age.

Watch out, Patty. They are coming after you.

Sarah Wildman points a senator who has a worse record on race than Trent Lott. From the anti-racist right, nary a peep.

A new front for the Taliban, the NWFP.
Some actions, however, have a distinctly Taliban feel to them. In Peshawar, cinema owners were forced to tear down billboards deemed obscene, and cinemas that play pornographic films were shut down. State officials have also forced all public bus drivers to remove cassette players and destroy music cassettes, and also talk of changing the weekly holiday from Sunday to Friday, the traditional day of Islamic prayer. More ominous, state police have begun to lodge new cases of blasphemy against those who are thought to have offended the Holy Koran or the name of Allah. Human rights advocates argue that such blasphemy laws are often used as retribution against political enemies.

Tim Noah examines the discrimination consequences of the Bush faith-based executive order. No surprise, if you are a religious charity you can discriminate all you want.

The lunacy of the conservative tax avoiders in getting to be too much even for them
"They're saying the burden on the top is too high," says Friedman of the conservative position. "But they're missing the fundamental reasons for that. The wealthy are taking a larger share of the income. Their incomes are too high."

This guy, Spitzer, is one to watch. He succeeded where the Feds failed in reforming how the securities world does business.

Saddam's excellent strategy continues. Unfortunately. Every time the Bushies get close to the line, he just gives them a little more rope. The lynching will be self-inflicted when they find nothing.

Tom Holsinger is too clever by half. His pseudo-invasion scenario has too much political risk. If we were conducting hostilities Hussein would be all over it maintaining that it was 10 times bigger than it actually is. Up to now I can give our armed forces credit for strategic ability but the administration has proven itself to be no more strategic than a pack of bullies.

Mickey Kaus thinks Noonan's article is good. I think it is lame.

The fact is that segregationists found a home in the Republican party. The conservative approach to racial issues gave them a cover under which they could retain their racist attitudes. Nonracist conservatives let that be because they needed the racist votes. The ambiguity served that purpose. Southern racists tended to also be the southern power structure and wealth. So, Peggy, don’t get all principled with us. The Republicans made a tacit deal with the Devil and you know it. That’s what is really generating the flap. Lott’s remark has made it impossible to hide that man pulling the levers behind the curtain.

The fear of some blacks that some whites do not accept them fully is well-founded, Ms. Noonan. Not a phantom that you can pooh-pooh away. They are not hallucinating but if you think their fears are groundless, you may be.

Trent Lott, personally, is not the issue. Removing him from power is not the solution to the problem. But removing what he symbolizes from power is the issue. And the onus is on the Republicans because they have permitted the racist ambiguity to continue. It is the task of the Republicans to not only denounce that ambiguity in no uncertain terms but to purge themselves of the racists that have used it to their continued political survival. It’s past time for the Republicans to toss their racists out into the cold.

They will lose some power and money in the process but the upside is that they will allow people of all races to reconsider the merits of the conservative agenda without being repelled by any implied racist code. Let the racists form their own party and compete independently for America’s hearts and minds. The race card that you say the Democrats like to play is a card that the Republicans keep dealing to them. Don’t deal it and they can’t play it. This cancer is much deeper than Senator Lott. If the Republicans boot him and do nothing else they will have dealt the Democrats a winning hand for every election to come.

Don't centralize the security effort. Decentralize it.
America doesn't need huge centralized databases that track each and every citizen. What it needs is decentralized intelligence. And that means extensive training for law-enforcement and government personnel on the ground, across the country. The country needs Customs personnel who know what to look for at the borders, like the officer in Port Angeles, Wash., who noticed a suspicious driver trying to enter the U.S., investigated further, and found a load of bomb components intended for attacks on Millennium celebrations.
America needs flight-training instructors like the one in Minnesota who alerted the FBI to Zacarias Moussaoui's alleged desire to learn to fly a plane but not to land one. The country needs alert passengers on airplanes, like those who noticed and took down shoe-bomber Robert Reid on American Airlines Flight 63 from Paris.

Go with what works. Don't take away privacy and still fail the test of security.

Insh'allah. As God wills.

Liar, Liar, Pants on fire! Cigarette companies could have made a product that was less likely to start fires decades ago. That would have saved up to 1000 lives a year. The companies said that the consumers didn't like the fire-safe cigarettes when their own studies showed that consumers couldn't tell the difference. But then their business isn't saving lives, it's killing people. They should be sued out of existence. And the horse they rode in on.

While Ron Bailey believes Gore may be laying low to improve his chances in '08, I wonder if he is looking to play some sort of supporting role as on appointee of the 2004 Democratic administration.

This article addresses what we should really be doing in securing our transportation system. We shouldn't worry about spending tons of money and suffering inconvenience to make sure every single aspect of the system is secure. We need to have overlapping layers of defense where each is pretty good but not necessarily perfect. The idea is to deter attacks. If the terrorist need only have sufficient reason to believe that he might be detected as to deter him from trying. You can slow traffic down all over town by setting up speed-trap camera boxes but you only need to have a few cameras. The uncertainty in the perpetrator's mind is the most effective deterrent.

There is no point in trying to protect against or weed out every possible opening for terrorists. That is a traditional approach to transportation security, but it is expensive and demonstrably ineffective. The new strategy should rely instead on layering and interleaving various defensive measures. With layering, each safeguard, even though it may be inadequate by itself, reinforces the others. A layering strategy will not only protect against vulnerabilities in transportation security, it will also deter terrorists by creating uncertainties about the chances of being caught.

It's unfortunate Gregg Easterbrook didn't read the preceding article about quantum gravity before he penned this one about science and faith coming together. Nor this one about life in space. With quantum gravity we have a universe that appears seamless because of the plethora of "observers" whose views all run together. With life viable in outer space it opens up the possibility even more that the peculiar circumstances that created life may not have happened on this planet. With the whole universe to work with, the origin of life becomes less unlikely and therefore less miraculous.

Are you ready for quantum gravity? A potential physics breakthrough.