ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES

For years, many women have been buoyed by the news about one of life's guilty pleasures: That nightly glass of wine may not only take the edge off a day but also improve their health. Now it turns out that sipping pinot noir might not be such a good idea after all.

A new study involving nearly 1.3 million middle-aged British women -- the largest ever to examine alcohol and cancer in women -- found that just one glass of chardonnay, a single beer or any other type of alcoholic drink per day increases the risk of a variety of cancers.

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"No one study is ever sufficient to make a recommendation," said Linda Van Horn, a professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern University who is chairing the committee revising the guidelines. "But it will be added to the body of literature that will be reviewed."

In the meantime, several experts said women should consult with their doctors about whether they should drink.

Traditionally, the division between conservatives and liberals has been over the role and size of the welfare state: liberals think that the government should play a large role in sanding off the market economy's rough edges, conservatives believe that time and chance happen to us all, and that's that.

But both sides, I thought, agreed that the government should provide public goods — goods that are nonrival (they benefit everyone) and nonexcludable (there's no way to restrict the benefits to people who pay.) The classic examples are things like lighthouses and national defense, but there are many others. For example, knowing when a volcano is likely to erupt can save many lives; but there's no private incentive to spend money on monitoring, since even people who didn't contribute to maintaining the monitoring system can still benefit from the warning. So that's the sort of activity that should be undertaken by government.

So what did Bobby Jindal choose to ridicule in this response to Obama last night? Volcano monitoring, of course.

The percentage of American households with children under 18 living at home last year hit the lowest point — 46% — in half a century, government data reported Wednesday.

The trend reflects the aging of the Baby Boom generation and younger women having fewer children, demographers say.

In 2008, about 35.7 million families (46%) had children under 18 at home, the Census figures show, down from 52% in 1950. The percentage peaked in 1963, when about 57% of families had children under 18 at home.

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The data also show:

•About 5.3 million "stay-at-home" mothers and 140,000 such fathers.

Hoping a new governor means a different result, abortion foes have combined three separate — and previously vetoed — abortion measures into a single bill.
HB 2564 would:
• Require women to wait for 24 hours before terminating a pregnancy.
• Allow health professionals, hospitals and pharmacists to refuse to perform abortions or provide "morning after" pills or even to "facilitate" a woman getting access to either.
• Specify what factors a judge may consider in determining if a minor is mature enough to have an abortion without first getting parental consent.

Now, from Limbaugh's website re: the gender gap found by PPP:

"The gender gap is one of the largest [Public Policy Polling] has seen on any issue it's polled in the last year, with [Rush] Limbaugh having a +19 (56/37) net favorability among men, but a -12 (37/49) with women." I have a 37% approval with women, 49% disapproval. "Thirty-one-point point gender gaps don't come along all that often." Now, ladies and gentlemen, this is an opportunity here, because this takes us to the age-old question: What do women want? Not even Freud was ultimately able to answer the question. Women generally, for the most part, can't answer it, either. But it has never stopped people from asking the question: What do women want? Given this massive gender gap in my personal approval numbers, a 31-point gender gap, it seems reasonable for me to convene a summit.

How:

We'll have a summit of all the women in this audience — or as many of them as we can get into breakout groups — and perhaps devote an hour in an upcoming program to calls only from women who genuinely want to talk to me. They can be liberal, conservative. They could be non-audience members, could be audience members. But I want some of these women to start telling me what it is I must do to close the gender gap — or, if not what it is I must do to close the gender gap, what it is I've done that has caused the gender gap; assuming the gender gap is true and that the poll is true.

Limbaugh's views on women are crystallized in this 'Rushbite':

One of my fabulous routines concerns a San Francisco men's club which lost its battle to exclude women from membership. The courts ruled that they had to admit women on the basis that businesswomen were being unfairly denied opportunities to do business. This is specious. How much business did women think they were going to get as a result of forcing their way in?
Anyway, after one year, the female members demanded their own exercise room. They were probably tired of being ogled by a bunch of slobbering men while they pumped iron in leotards and spandex. The men offered to install the first three exercise machines in the women's new workout room. The ladies were thrilled. When they arrived on that first exciting day they found, to their stunned amazement, a washing machine, an ironing board, and a vacuum cleaner. Heh, heh, heh. (The Way Things Ought To Be, p.142-45 Jul 2, 1992)

As Media Matters has documented, Limbaugh recently referred to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) as sounding like a "screeching ex-wife." On the February 21 broadcast of his show, Limbaugh said that Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter is "a girl" and claimed that Jack Carter, son of former President Jimmy Carter, "has been castrated by the feminization of this culture."

From the November 30 broadcast of Premiere Radio Networks' The Rush Limbaugh Show:

LIMBAUGH: My cat -- here's how you can get fooled. My cat comes to me when she wants to be fed. I have learned this. I accept it for what it is. Many people in my position would think my cat's coming to me because she loves me. Well, she likes me, and she is attached, but she comes to me when she wants to be fed. And after I feed her -- guess what -- she's off to wherever she wants to be in the house, until the next time she gets hungry. She's smart enough to know she can't feed herself. She's actually a very smart cat. She gets loved. She gets adoration. She gets petted. She gets fed. And she doesn't have to do anything for it, which is why I say this cat's taught me more about women, than anything my whole life. But we put voices in their mouths.

So the question is this: Will this country want to actually watch a woman get older before their eyes on a daily basis?

We know -- we've been told that Elizabeth Edwards is smarter than John Edwards. That's part of the puff pieces on them that we've seen. Ergo, if Elizabeth Edwards is smarter than John Edwards, is it likely that she thinks she knows better than he does what his speeches ought to contain and what kind of things he ought to be doing strategy-wise in the campaign? If she is smarter than he is, could it have been her decision to keep going with the campaign? In other words, could it be that she doesn't shut up? Now, that's as far as I'm going to go.

Well, you're -- Snerdley says he's missing something. If you're missing it, you're going to have to provide it. What are you missing? Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

I can't close the loop on it. I can't close the loop on it. I'm on -- you know, I'm in a little quicksand already today talking about how the chicks are giving us boring pictures of the female athletes from the Olympics. Because I know -- you -- the diversity crowd's going to be upset. They're going to -- "Ooh, do you mean the Olympics are just so you guys can ogle wom--" Yes, because we do not care to watch 'em compete. But back to Elizabeth and the Breck Girl.

I'm sorry, my friends, I just -- I can't. It just seems to me that Edwards might be attracted to a woman whose mouth did something other than talk.

Democrats were outraged Wednesday morning when Republican state Sen. Dave Schultheis said he planned to vote against a bill to require HIV tests for pregnant women because the disease "stems from sexual promiscuity" and he didn't think the Legislature should "remove the negative consequences that take place from poor behavior and unacceptable behavior." The Colorado Springs lawmaker then proceeded to cast the lone vote against SB-179, which passed 32-1 and moves on to the House.

Sexual promiscuity, we know, causes a lot of problems in our state, one of which, obviously, is the contraction of HIV. And we have other programs that deal with the negative consequences — we put up part of our high schools where we allow students maybe 13 years old who put their child in a small daycare center there.

We do things continually to remove the negative consequences that take place from poor behavior and unacceptable behavior, quite frankly, and I don't think that's the role of this body.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg returned to the Supreme Court bench yesterday with a wide smile and a long list of questions for the lawyers appearing before her, resuming her duties less than three weeks after surgery for pancreatic cancer.

Ginsburg, who will turn 76 next month, smiled broadly as she walked into the courtroom with her eight colleagues and turned slightly to look directly at reporters who chronicled her Feb. 5 surgery and diagnosis of early-stage cancer.

She was a vigorous participant in yesterday's two oral arguments, and even teased veteran Supreme Court practitioner Carter Phillips about whether an opinion she wrote in 2003 had misstated the justices' intentions.

U.S. Representative Hilda Solis, the daughter of two union members, was confirmed by a Senate vote today as the nation's 25th labor secretary.

The nomination was approved with bipartisan support after Republicans ended efforts to delay a vote over concerns about her ties to union groups and tax liens on her husband's business. The vote was 80-17.

Is Michelle Obama really in the kitchen?

If you had a choice of four daycare centers run separately by Michelle Obama, Sarah Palin, Hillary Clinton, and Nancy Pelosi, which would you choose for your kids?

Alabama: COME ON IN AND GITCHA SOME.
Alaska: WE CAN'T ACTUALLY SEE RUSSIA FROM HERE.
Arizona: WHERE AIRSTREAMS GO TO DIE.
Arkansas: HELL, YES, WE SELL LIQUOR ON EASTER AND CHRISTMAS.
California: WE REALLY PISS YOU OFF, DON'T WE?
Colorado: WHERE PROACTIVE HOLISTICISM EMPOWERS INTROSPECTIVE PERSONHOOD.
Connecticut: FIRST IN LYME DISEASE.
Delaware: IT AIN'T DOVER TILL IT'S DOVER.
Florida: WE GOT DOZENS OF PEOPLE WHO STILL SPEAK ENGLISH.
Georgia: SORRY, WHAT WAS THE QUESTION?
Hawaii: NO MORE "I GOT LEI'D" JOKES, OKAY?
Idaho: SERIOUSLY, WE'RE STILL SEEING THOSE BLACK HELICOPTERS.
Illinois: THE STATE THAT'S MOSTLY A CITY.
Indiana: WHERE FOLKS ACTUALLY VOTED ON WHAT TIME IT WAS.
Iowa: GIVE US ONE MORE SHOT AT ETHANOL, OKAY?

There is so much wretchedness in the world, that we may safely take the word of any mortal professing to need our assistance; and, even should we be deceived, still the good to ourselves resulting from a kind act is worth more than the trifle by which we purchase it.

Of course, the Suleman story is objectionable and infuriating to us on so many levels because she clearly seems to be deranged. Or maybe she is just depraved. Maybe she is a manipulative, scheming, deceiver, who is thinking only of self. I am not trying to bash the lady – that line is really too long.

After all, if OctoMom, as she has been dubbed, is indeed trying to “work the system” with the mother of all scams (literally), is she really all that different from many others right now? I’m talking about those who are already slowing down on the personal responsibility side of things because we have a cool new government in place ready to stimulate all of us. Nadya Suleman may be more like the not-too-distant future of America than we might care or dare to admit.

Do we really want to admire nations where people surrender significantly more than half of what they earn to a government in exchange for state-run services that are chronically insufficient, incompetent, and impersonal?

If so, then we need to be fair and concede that, as Pogo might have put it, we have met Nadya Suleman and she is our future.

No, not Buffalo! Not our very own American city, where it snows all the time and where residents just oversaw the tragedy of the Continental Airlines plane crash. How much are they supposed to bear?

[W]e see in the papers every day -- from India to Pakistan and sometimes to Egypt and to other Arab countries -- wives, daughters and sisters being horribly mutilated and killed, sometimes being burned alive or their faces disfigured by acid, by male family members for everything from marrying a man of their own choice to being the victim of village rape.

Americans of Muslim faith and of Middle Eastern or South Asian descent will be judged by these events and changes (or non-changes) in their mother countries. It is simply human nature.

It is also time, then, not only for American Muslims to speak out against such horror -- how silent, so many of them have been! -- but especially for Muslim imams and other officials to cry out to the holy heavens against them. Where are their voices?

Ultimately, a death like Assiya Hassan's -- how many beheadings exactly have you heard of, even among the most violent of American men recently? -- will simply confirm to the rest of America that this is a Muslim tradition.

Hagerman said he killed his son on instructions from God out of fear that "the anti-Christ would take his soul." On his MySpace page, Hagerman - a former Marine now working as a school security guard - wrote of his struggles with schizophrenia but said he had overcome it through his religious faith.

Sure, some women have written great pieces about the meltdown, including the ways that women have been hit -- and missed. Two weeks back, Jennifer Barrett noted "that many of the jobs being generated for women [in the proposed stimulus bill] will probably come later and pay far less than the jobs being created in fields dominated by men." Linda Hirshman's December NYT op-ed took Team Obama to task for weighting the stimulus plan toward creating jobs in sectors that employ very few women (construction and green jobs, to name two). She followed up with a virtual master class on how to unpack dicey numbers and squishy logic, toasting Team Obama for releasing an unrealistically rosy report on the stimulus bill's projected positive effect on women's employment. She also offers a smart, refreshingly understandable explanation of why it's not quite right to say that the economic crisis is hurting men more and in greater number than it's hurting women. (Hint: Women's rate of unemployment is rising faster than men's; women earn less.)

...

I'm guessing that women aren't writing about the economy at nearly the rate that we're writing about abortion, sexist ads and the latest asshattery from the Palin clan for a number of reasons. First, we've too narrowly defined what constitutes a feminist issue. Second, our response to any of those hot button issues is stronger, more immediately personal and easier for us to understand than the slog through hell that is the 1,000+-page stimulus bill. Finally, I suspect that many of us are hesitant either because we think we don't know enough, or because we really don't know enough.

Many factors contribute to osteopenia or osteoporosis (very low bone mineral density) in cyclists, but one of the culprits is the nature of the exercise itself. Cycling is a low-impact sport that puts little mechanical load on the bones. That's great if you have joint problems, but it's the weight-bearing nature of exercise that signals bones to create more mass. Without such stress, bones don't get stronger, making them more prone to injury.

Avid cyclists, both amateur and professional, seem to be especially at risk of bone injuries if they don't do any type of cross-training. (Swimmers may also be in danger, since that sport requires little mechanical loading as well.) The lower spine is a particularly susceptible area, since it gets almost no loading. The hips may get some from the action of pedaling.

The most comprehensive review of literature on the subject, carried out by the World Cancer Research Fund concluded that alcohol increases the risk of cancers of the mouth, voice box, throat, colon cancer, liver and breast cancer.

The report said there is a dose response, with the more alcohol drunk the greater the risk, and there is no level which has found not to increase the risk of some cancers.

Scientists had thought that drinking small amounts of alcohol was good for heart health but this is now being disputed.

Sexy calendars and pictures of topless models in tabloid newspapers really do lead men to think of women as objects, research shows.

When men are shown images of women in bikinis, the part of the brain they use when thinking about DIY tools and other objects lights up.

At the same time, the region they use to try to tune into another person's thoughts and feelings tunes down, brain scans showed.

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Professor Fiske, of Princeton University in the U.S., said the effect could spill over into the workplace, with girlie calendars leading men to sexualise their colleagues.

She said: 'I am not saying there should be censorship but people need to know of the associations people have in their minds.'

Asked if women were likely to view half-dressed men in the same way, she said that women tended to rate age and bank balance over looks.

The roots of California's inability to address its budget woes are statutory and political. The state, unlike most others, requires a two-thirds majority vote in the Legislature to pass budgets and tax increases. And its process for creating voter initiatives hamstrings the budget process by directing money for some programs while depriving others of cash.

In a Legislature dominated by Democrats, some of whom lean far to the left, leaders have been unable to gather enough support from Republican lawmakers, who tend on average to be more conservative than the majority of California's Republican voters and have unequivocally opposed all tax increases.

And then there is Governor Schwarzenegger, whose budget woes far outweigh those of his predecessor, Gray Davis, whom he drummed from office in a 2003 recall that stemmed from the state's fiscal problems at the time. The governor has failed to muster votes among lawmakers in his own party, whom he often opposes on ideological grounds, resulting in more scorn from Democrats.

Furthermore, Republican leaders in the Senate and the Assembly who have agreed to get on board with a plan have been unable to persuade a few key lawmakers to join them. The package needs at least three Republican votes in each house, to join with the 51 Democrats in the Assembly and the 24 Democrats in the Senate.

President Obama, with his constant chatter about change and shaking things up and new ways of doing things, had rattled some traditionalists in this area -- especially those lacking a proper level of cynicism.

But a review of the early demographic data of Obama's first 56 selections for Senate-confirmed top jobs in the departments and agencies shows a marked tendency to choose old, white guys from the East Coast with credentials from elite universities.

In other words, not to worry. The Establishment remains firmly established. The Beltway is king.

In fact, half of Obama's first 56 senior-level picks are from the D.C. area and an additional 18 percent are from elsewhere on the East Coast. New York has four appointees, Massachusetts two, and there's one each from Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey and Virginia, according to a count by our colleague Sarah Cohen.

As would be expected, Illinois is well represented -- home to four appointees. Five come from California. No other state has more than two people in the mix. Overall, it appears more than half, 55 percent, are retreads from the Clinton administration.

Thirty-eight of the 56 appointees (68 percent) are men. (But white men, representing 46 percent of all picks, fall short of a majority.)

Nearly 70 percent of these appointees are white, 7 percent are of Asian or Pacific island descent, 16 percent are African American, and 7 percent are Latino.

Peshawar, Pakistan - In its latest effort to stem the spread of Taliban militancy, Pakistan is expanding the rule of Islamic law.

In a deal announced Monday, the government agreed to a suite of legal reforms, including the establishment of a religious court of appeals serving only the tribal region of Malakand. The area includes the Swat Valley, a strategic corridor first infiltrated in 2007 by Taliban militants and the scene of an Army counteroffensive. On the eve of the agreement, the Taliban operating in Swat announced a cease-fire with government troops.

Previous Pakistani truces have faced US criticism for merely giving militants space and time to rearm. This latest deal raises the added concern that the government is trading away secular traditions and taking a step toward Islamic law, or sharia.

However, political leaders and analysts here agree that this religious court system would not invoke some of the most draconian punishments often associated with sharia. And it is widely seen as a popular move to restore the efficient rule of law in a country where the secular court system often takes years to resolve cases.

Local family planned to be on flight 3407

Passenger Missed Connection to Doomed Continental Flight 3407 That Killed 50
Paul Twaragowski: 'For Whatever Reason, I Wasn't Meant to Be on There'

It's really hard, when looking at the legislation Campfield is trying to get passed, as a whole, to not get a sense of my vagina as some ancient, sacred thing–like the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark–that Campfield is trying to keep closed except under special ritual circumstances in order to keep it from melting the flesh off people.

How sacred is my vagina?

It is so sacred that parents should be able to keep their children from learning about what it does in school (HB0811). So taboo that advertisements for it should be subject to a 25% sales tax (HB0809) and that, if you want to look at it, you should be charged an "amusement tax" (HB0810). So mysterious and full of danger is my vagina that we must forbid kids from even learning that there are other things you can do with it besides have babies (HB0821).

According to Campfield, my vagina is so powerful and mysterious that it can fool a man into raising a kid that's not his without his knowledge and trick him into paying child support for a child he isn't genetically related to (HB0805). My vagina has magical powers that confer legal personhood on the fetuses that die just north of it (HB0807 & HB0819) in some cases causing a person to be issued a death certificate before he or she has the legal ability to be dead.

A group of Indian women have started the awesomely-named Consortium of Pubgoing, Loose and Forward Women and launched a campaign to send pink panties, or chaddis, to Pramod Muthalik, leader of the Sri Ram Sena, in protest of his misogynist horseshit.

And, then, on Valentine's Day, women across the world are being encouraged to: "Go to a pub wherever you are. From Kabul to Chennai to Guwahati to Singapore to LA women have signed up. It does not matter if you are actually not a pub-goer or not even much of a drinker. Let us raise a toast (it can be juice) to Indian women. Take a photo or video. We will put it together (more on how later) and send this as well to the Sri Ram Sena."

Although I don't believe in “comparing oppressions,” I am amazed at the audacity of women who are descended from a group that actually OWNED other women who then can turn around and compare themselves to a group in whose oppression their own ancestors explicitly participated.

Greenspan Says He Was Mystified by Subprime Market

Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, told CNBC in a documentary to be shown Thursday night that he did not fully understand the scope of the subprime mortgage market until well into 2005 and could not make sense of the complex derivative products created out of mortgages.

"So everybody in retrospect now knows that that boom was developing under the markets for quite a period of time, but nobody knew it," Mr. Greenspan told CNBC's David Faber. "In 2004, there was just no credible information on that. It wasn't until we got well into 2005 that the first inklings that that was developing was emerging," he said.

Summary: During appearances on Lou Dobbs Tonight and Glenn Beck, Dobbs and Beck allowed Betsy McCaughey to advance the false claim that provisions in the economic recovery act would permit the government to control health care. In fact, the provisions she cited address establishing an electronic records system in part for the purpose of "reduc[ing] health care costs resulting from inefficiency, medical errors, inappropriate care, duplicative care, and incomplete information." It does not say that the federal government will determine what constitutes "unnecessary care."

Senate Democratic leadership has announced who will be serving on the conference committee to iron out differences in the House and Senate versions of the stimulus bill.

* Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.
* Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont.
* Appropriations Committee Chairman Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii
* Finance Committee Ranking Member Charles Grassley, R-Iowa
* Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Thad Cochran, R-Miss.

Both Finance and Appropriations were heavily involved in the creation of the Senate version, with each committee holding markups on their portions.

And for the House:

* Appropriations Committee Chairman Dave Obey, D-Wis.
* Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel, D-N.Y.
* Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif.
* Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Jerry Lewis, R-Calif.
* Ways and Means Committee Ranking Member Dave Camp, R-Mich.

During the February 10 edition of Fox News' Happening Now, co-host Jon Scott claimed that "the Senate is expected to pass the $838 billion stimulus plan -- its version of it, anyway. We thought we'd take a look back at the bill, how it was born, and how it grew, and grew, and grew." In tracking how and when the bill purportedly "grew," Scott referenced seven dates, as on-screen graphics cited various news sources from those time periods. However, all of the sources and cost figures Scott cited, as well as the accompanying on-screen text, were also contained in a February 10 press release issued by the Senate Republican Communications Center. One on-screen graphic during the segment even repeated a typo from the GOP document, further confirming that Scott was simply reading from a Republican press release.

The overarching theme of Republican writers involved the issue of the mother of the octuplets relying on government money to raise her children. There was also quite a bit written about Suleman's physical appearance.

...

Over on the Democratic forums, the debate was much more extensive. Like the Republican forum writers, the majority seemed to feel it was wrong for a single woman living with her parents to have 14 children with no income other than funds from a disability claim.

Unlike the Republicans, the Democrats didn't say much about Suleman's looks...

The Synod decided last summer to press ahead with the ordination of women bishops, angering traditionalists by denying them the legal right to opt out of the control of a woman bishop and into special dioceses headed by male alternatives.

However, a draft law to be discussed this week would provide for male "complementary" bishops, to look after parishes unwilling to accept a woman.

Some traditionalist clergy say they will join the Catholic Church if they are not given sufficient exemptions from serving under women bishops.

Giti Pourfazel, a lawyer and female activist, believes those liberty-seeking women who supported the Islamic revolution were unaware of the true nature of a religious state.

"Some women felt they would stand a better chance of achieving their demands if they could emancipate themselves from political entanglements, but it was too late when they realised that a religious regime, due to its boundaries, could hardly deal with women's issues intellectually.

"Women had already hit home some of their demands but lost them after the revolution, such as the Family Law, which was annulled immediately after the revolution. The reason was women were rallying under a religious flag, which had other priorities and ignored female rights."

But the huge turnout of women during the Iranian Revolution of 1979 encouraged many of them to engage in social activity for the very first time. Studies by sociologists in recent years show that women are becoming increasingly aware of how the law discriminates against them.

A new Gallup poll shows that President Obama is continuing to enjoy high approval in handling the economic stimulus debate -- and his brand is solidly beating the Congressional Republicans, too.

The numbers: Obama has a 67% approval and only 25% disapproval on how he's handled the stimulus bill, compared to Congressional Republicans' 31% approval and very high 58% disapproval.

The Italian government has been plunged into a constitutional crisis over the fate of a 38-year-old woman who has been in a coma for the past 17 years. Eluana Englaro was left in a vegetative state after a car crash in 1992. After a decade-long court battle, doctors reduced her nutrition on Friday in preparation for removing her feeding tubes, which her father claims would be in accordance with her wishes.

But in an extraordinary turn of events, the country's prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, after consultation with the Vatican, has issued an emergency decree stating that food and water cannot be suspended for any patient depending upon them, reversing the earlier court ruling. On issuing the emergency decree, Berlusconi declared: "This is murder. I would be failing to rescue her. I'm not a Pontius Pilate."

Justifying his campaign to save Englaro's life, the prime minister added that, physically at least, she was "in the condition to have babies", a remark described by La Stampa newspaper as "shocking".

When did it become so ordinary, so acceptable to be a p***y? To be so helpless and inept and pathetic? And why don’t we – and our elected officials and our media – look all these embarrassing people in the face and tell them to go make their own crutches or lie by the side of the road and rot as they choose?

Jim Brown said: “A liberal is arrogant enough to think he can do you a half-***ed favor. He is superior enough to think he can give you something that you don’t deserve. A liberal will cut off your leg so he can hand you a crutch.”

The statements will be no surprise to roughly 50 percent of this country. We know them to be true. It’s why we fear liberals.

I imagine if a liberal handed Jim a crutch, he’d beat him over the head with it. Even if he had to hop on one good leg while doing it.

Jennifer Figge pressed her toes into the Caribbean sand, exhilarated and exhausted as she touched land this week for the first time in almost a month.

Reaching a beach in Trinidad, she became the first woman on record to swim across the Atlantic Ocean — a dream she'd had since the early 1960s, when a stormy trans-Atlantic flight got her thinking she could don a life vest and swim the rest of the way if needed.

The 56-year-old left the Cape Verde Islands off Africa's western coast on Jan. 12, swimming 19 out of 25 days battling waves of up to 30 feet. The distance from Cape Verde to Trinidad is roughly 700 miles. Crewmembers are still computing exactly how many miles she swam.

It is certainly not the most fun test in the world, with a special catheter in place, a drape to collect any leaked urine, another catheter and balloon in the rectum, and either a surface or needle electrode in the perineum …

A January 27 New York Times story, "The Epidemic That Wasn't," brought the news that researchers following children prenatally exposed to cocaine have found "the long-term effects of such exposure on children's brain development and behavior appear relatively small" and are "less severe than those of alcohol and are comparable to those of tobacco."

Though the Times makes it sound like breaking news, the fact is many reputable people disbelieved the whole "crack baby" phenomenon from the beginning: Even Dr. Ira Chasnoff, whose 1985 study spurred much of the early coverage, was lamenting as long ago as 1992 that medical research was being misused: "It's interesting, it sells newspapers and it perpetuates the us-vs.-them idea."

The saddest part: Early on, researchers recognized that the social stigma attached to being identified as a "crack baby" could far outweigh any biological impact. The Times piece underscores that, with a source who says, "Society's expectations of the children and reaction to the mothers are completely guided not by the toxicity but by the social meaning" of the drug.

The Army is investigating a stunning number of suicides in January — a count that could surpass all combat deaths on America's two warfronts last month.

According to figures obtained by The Associated Press, there were 24 suspected suicides in January, compared to only four in January of 2008, six in January of 2007 and 10 in January of 2006.

Yearly suicides have been rising steadily since 2004 amid increasing stress on the force from long and repeated tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The service has rarely, if ever, released a month-by-month update on suicides, but officials said Thursday that they wanted to re-emphasize "the urgency and seriousness necessary for preventive action at all levels" of the force.

An alarmed Army leadership also took the unusual step of briefing congressional leaders on the information Thursday morning.

The big monthly count follows an annual report last week showing that soldiers killed themselves at the highest rate on record in 2008. The toll for all of last year — 128 confirmed and 15 pending investigation — was an increase for the fourth straight year and even surpassed the suicide rate among civilians.

The essence of the problem is this: Rich people used to set their own norms. For example, if one rich person wanted to use the company helicopter to aerate the ponds on his properties, and the other rich people on his board of directors thought this a sensible thing to do, then he could go ahead and do it without any serious repercussions.

But now, after the TARP, the auto bailout, the stimulus package, the Fed rescue packages and various other federal interventions, rich people no longer get to set their own rules. Now lifestyle standards for the privileged class are set by people who live in Ward Three.

For those who don't know, Ward Three is a section of Northwest Washington, D.C., where many Democratic staffers, regulators, journalists, lawyers, Obama aides and senior civil servants live. Thanks to recent and coming bailouts and interventions, the people in Ward Three run the banks and many major industries. Through this power, they get to insert themselves into the intricacies of upscale life, influencing when private jets can be flown, when friends can lend each other their limousines and at what golf resorts corporate learning retreats can be held.

In the first place, many people in Ward Three suffer from Sublimated Liquidity Rage. As lawyers, TV producers and senior civil servants, they make decent salaries, but 60 percent of their disposable income goes to private school tuition and study abroad trips. They have little left over to spend on themselves, which generates deep and unacknowledged self-pity.

Second, they suffer from what has been called Status-Income Disequilibrium. At work they are flattered and feared. But they still have to go home and clean out the gutters because they can't afford full-time household help.

Third, they suffer the status rivalries endemic to the upper-middle class. As law school grads, they resent B-school grads. As Washingtonians, they resent New Yorkers. As policy wonks, they resent people with good bone structure.

Have all the Democrats gone to an undisclosed location where there aren't any teevee cameras?

This is the way it's supposed to be, with division sharp, clear and meaningful.

There are two parties, and each believes in different things. The Democrats don't want to cut federal taxes. They have their reasons. The Republicans want to cut taxes. They have their reasons too.

...

So it's all pretty clear and not at all murky. Whoever is right will triumph and be politically rewarded, and whoever isn't will not.

This is good. It's not "Tweedledum and Tweedledee," and it's not "There's not a dime's worth of difference between them." It's a choice, not an echo.

It looks like a win but feels like a loss.

The party-line vote in favor of the stimulus package could have been more, could have produced not only a more promising bill but marked the beginning of something new, not a postpartisan era (there will never be such a thing and never should be; the parties exist to fight through great political questions) but a more bipartisan one forced by crisis and marked by—well, let's call it seriousness.

...

It's a win because of the obvious headline: Nine days after inauguration, the new president achieves a major Congressional victory, House passage of an economic stimulus bill by a vote of 244-188. It wasn't even close. This is major.

But do you know anyone, Democrat or Republican, dancing in the street over this? You don't. Because most everyone knows it isn't a good bill, and knows that its failure to receive a single Republican vote, not one, suggests the old battle lines are hardening. Back to the Crips versus the Bloods. Not very inspiring.

Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House, is on TV explaining the (at this point the congregation shall fall to its knees and prostrate itself) "stimulus." "How," asks the lady from CBS, "does $335 million in STD prevention stimulate the economy?"

"I'll tell you how," says Speaker Pelosi. "I'm a big believer in prevention. And we have, er… there is a part of the bill on the House side that is about prevention. It's about it being less expensive to the states to do these measures."

Makes a lot of sense. If we have more STD prevention, it will be safer for loose women to go into bars and pick up feckless men, thus stimulating the critical beer and nuts and jukebox industries. To do this, we need trillion-dollar deficits, which our children and grandchildren will have to pay off, but, with sufficient investment in prevention measures, there won't be any children or grandchildren, so there's that problem solved.

The average tax rate paid by the richest 400 Americans fell by a quarter to 17.2 percent through the first six years of the Bush administration and their average income doubled to $263.3 million, new IRS data show.

The 17.2 percent tax rate in 2006 was the lowest since the IRS began tracking the 400 largest taxpayers in 1992, although the richest 400 Americans paid more tax on an inflation-adjusted basis than any year since 2000.

The drop from 2001's tax rate of 22.9 percent was due largely to ex-President George W. Bush's push to cut tax rates on most capital gains to 15 percent in 2003.

Capital gains made up 63 percent of the richest 400 Americans' adjusted gross income in 2006, or a combined $66.1 billion, according to the data. In all, the 400 wealthiest Americans reported a combined $105.3 billion of adjusted gross income in 2006, the most recent year for which the IRS has data.

In 2007, at 55, Jill Biden did earn a doctorate -- in education -- from the University of Delaware. Since then, in campaign news releases and now in White House announcements, she is "Dr. Jill Biden." This strikes some people as perfectly appropriate and others as slightly pompous, a quality often ascribed to her voluble husband.

"It's a funny topic," Goldstein said. "Occasionally someone will call me 'doctor,' and when that happens my wife makes fun of me a little bit. But nobody thought it was pretentious to call Henry Kissinger 'Dr. Kissinger.' "

"Ordinarily when someone goes by doctor and they are a PhD, not an MD, I find it a little bit obnoxious," Sullivan said. "But it makes me smile because it's a reminder that she's her own person. She wasn't there as an appendage; she was there as a professional in her own right."

Newspapers, including The Times, generally do not use the honorific "Dr." unless the person in question has a medical degree.

"My feeling is if you can't heal the sick, we don't call you doctor," said Bill Walsh, copy desk chief for the Washington Post's A section and the author of two language books.

Two new studies indicate that the threshold of what doctors consider "normal" levels of bad cholesterol, or LDL, may be too high, leaving thousands of people vulnerable to heart attacks and strokes.

One of the studies, led by Gregg Fonarow of UCLA, examined 131,000 hospital admissions for heart disease and found that at least half of the patients had normal LDL levels. The other study, called JUPITER, involved 18,000 people. It showed that giving a cholesterol-lowering statin to older people with normal LDL cut their risk of heart attack and stroke in half.

Taken together, doctors say, the studies suggest that accepted notions of normal LDL are wrong — and that current treatment guidelines miss at least half of those who should be getting a statin.

Millions untreated

JUPITER suggests that millions more older people — as many as 11 million, Yale researcher Erica Spatz reported this month — should be getting statins. That would bring the total to about 45 million people, or 80% of all men older than 50 and all women older than 60.

But UCLA's Fonarow, whose study was published in the American Heart Journal, says there's another possibility. "There are two potential implications," he says. "Either the threshold of what was set as an ideal LDL was set outrageously high, thus allowing the vast majority of patients to be missed, or LDL isn't much of a risk factor.

"It's got to be one of the two."

One ad features a large-busted blond woman with M.I.L.F. in huge letters above her and the Spirit version—Many Islands Low Fares—in much smaller type below. Right.

Other Spirit ads assert: "We're proud of our DDs." That's "deep discounts."