I'm really, really trying to cut down on Obama-bashing, mainly because it's too easy.  But I just must pass along this comment from Victor Davis Hanson:

After watching some of this, I don’t think Obama will be having many town hall debates with McCain.  However undeniable his calm and presence, he is simply incapable of extemporizing. A written transcript of this interview would be embarrassing, since it would be largely streams of meandering—and, but that, ah, you know, that, and, with uh, uh, I don’t think, ah, ah, that, that, I think, that, that, on, on, an issue…”

. . .

When Obama is asked a question he has not prepped for, he sort of goes into the spinning-eyes mode that one used to associate with the young Dan Quayle in his first weeks on the campaign trail. He knows he should not mouth his postmodern banalities, pauses, and then says something he knows simply won’t work.

At this point I would not be at all surprised to see Hillary Clinton pull off some kind of putsch and steal the Democratic Party Presidential nomination out from under Obama's nose.  And you know what?  I'm OK with that.  We're going to need a President with a backbone of steel in the next four years, to deal with the Russians and all the other geopolitical problems in the world.  Whatever you say about their politics, I think both Clinton and McCain have that.  If Obama has it too, I haven't seen it.

Via Powerline

 

So says this article from LiveScience:

About 2 million years ago, the human brain rapidly increased its mass until it was double the size of other primate brains.

"This happened because we started to eat better food, like eating more meat," said researcher Philipp Khaitovich of the Partner Institute for Computational Biology in Shanghai.

Stay smart.  Eat meat.

Via NextBigFuture:

 Using corn to make ethanol is really, really, really stupid.  The only reason to do it is to allow corn farmers and ethanol producers to push their snouts even more deeply into the Federal money trough and continue gobbling up tax money.

Corn-Ethanol subsidies need to end.  Now.

I think that much is certain, watching Russian forces move into the (breakaway) Georgian province of South Ossetia, and watching Russian air strikes hit in and around Georgian cities that are not South Ossetia.

These two paragraphs from the New York Times, no warmongering rag, should give everybody pause right now:

In Washington, American officials reacted with deepening alarm to Russia’s military activities on Sunday. Georgian troops had tried to disengage, but the Russians had not allowed them.

“The Georgians told them, ‘We’re done. Let us withdraw,” one American military official said. “But the Russians are not letting them withdraw. They are pursuing them, and people are seeing this.”

This is not anything like the American adventure in Iraq.  It's eerily similar to the Sudetenland, 1938.

The free world will stand up to aggression now, or we will fight a bigger war, later.  I am not hopeful tonight that we will make the correct, difficult choice.  We shall see.

I'm not sure if this is another clever photoshop, or the real thing:

Hat tip:  let's see . . . Doug Ross, via Fausta's blog, via Protein Wisdom.

Or rather, my web browsing history is.

This site has a neat little button, hit it and it'll tell you what percent male vs. female it thinks you are, by reading your web browser's history file.  Go on, try it.  It won't hurt.

(Although you poor sorry misguided Internet Explorer users might experience a delay.  Get with the program and use Firefox, already, like all the cool dudes and dudettes do.)

New York Times, via Yahoo Finance and Instapundit:

But a couple of months later, Mr. Steele noticed the site had been charging his credit card. While he believed he had signed up for a free report, he had actually enrolled in a credit-monitoring service that cost $14.95 a month. He says he never expected that it would cost anything.

"It's called FreeCreditReport.com," he said. "It's kind of easy to make that assumption. I didn't see anything in the process of signing up that said, 'Hey, if you don't cancel in 30 days or whatever, you're going to get charged.'"

BigRipOff.com is more like it, in my opinion.

As the article points out, if you want your annual free credit report mandated by Federal law, go to Annualcreditreport.com.  That one is The Real Thing.  Accept no substitutes.  Believe no ads, especially ones with guys singing insipidly insidiously catchy ditties.

Oh, and we also need to send the Starving Evil Whippet Dog Devil Ravening Pack the way of those responsible for the entire GEICO and Progressive Insurance ad campaigns, while we're at it.

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is available for viewing free-of-charge on Hulu.

Wrenching this delightful little piece of guerilla strike-breaking further into political allegory. . . who can you think of in the news is:

• Arrogantly convinced he's right;
• Gets fawning press;
• Takes credit for good things, regardless of whether or not he's actually responsible for them;
• In the end, (well, that's a spoiler).

I can't help but think of a certain Presidential candidate this year.

And no, that doesn't mean that I think that the other one is Dr. Horrible.  Although . . .

A hand-slapping-your-own-head "duh" moment, courtesy Reason:

Hospitals gain a "charity" tax deduction for the difference between what they collect and their "list" prices. If they can actually collect the money, which they often do by threatening collection lawsuits, they make a tremendous profit. If not, then they deduct from taxable income their phantom "losses" from patients who don't pay.

So, for example, an ambulance ride with a "list cost" of $1000 could bring in $1000 from a patient who pays or a tax deduction of $1,000 from the patient who doesn't, which then can be deducted against other income. Furthermore, the "list" prices inflate other medical costs. The uninsured today are a major source of hospital profits, as detailed in J. Patrick Rooney and Dan Perrin's America's Health Care Crisis Solved. The book describes how a Denver hospital patient tracked down the charges for his treatment paid by medicare and health insurance companies, which totaled $6,000, compared to the $67,000 the hospital demanded.

I always wondered why medical bills were so enormously much higher than what the insurance companies would pay for the services.  Now I know.  The fix is in the system.