Yeah. We're set up to think about sex, and not on an intellectual basis. But for people who are raised to think sex for pleasure is just the worst thing in the world, there's an apparent tendency to try to pass all their sexual thoughts off as disapproval. Like: "I'm just thinking about how immoral this stuff is.…

When Obama spends 3 TRillion bucks, gets 4,487 American soldiers killed, plus 318 soldiers from 22 other countries and so many civilians we honestly can't count them—including those specifically killed by the shoddy work of Republican contractors—and produces 1,600 soldiers missing at least an entire limb, ~90,000…

You're right—I had forgotten that the Kennedy-era support for the space race, and the solid support for science and education that went with it, was an artifact of the Cold War.

I don't think Newt intends this to be done by private enterprise.

Another Republican trying to sell a big-budget, high-probability-of-failure idea that he figures can serve as a conduit between the US Treasury and whichever contractors grease his and/or the RNC's palms. Hey, it worked with the war in Iraq.

I honestly don't think he's a hypocrite in these matters. Hypocrites at least have some sort of reality check.

Not only would I believe him if he said he'd only had sex with Mrs. Santorum, but I'm afraid I'm also inclined to believe that he is a 50-something-year-old married man who has never had a BJ. (And sure as hell never went down on poor Mrs. S. )

. . . claiming he was nothing better than a philanderer.

Oh, I think the Republicans' intentionally skipping over the title of a man who was elected by a landslide majority of Americans may be not so much racism (in itself) as the sort of abject pettiness and jerkwaddery we've come to expect from people who think referring to their opposition as the "Democrat Party" does…

Would that be the same wife he introduced to his parents as a "one-handed Thai Buddhist" ?

Deemer: Thanks—that's a much more interesting story.

God, I hope his kids have more sense than to go to him if they need help with any sex-related problem.

With all due respect to the good rabbi, he got it backwards.

The ugly part about Newt isn't that he committed adultery. Adultery is part of the human condition.

There's a model around ([www.theassc.org] [PDF]) that has newborns as naturally synesthetes—i.e., sensations that you'd figure to be experienced through a particular sense (e.g., the sound of Daddy's raspberry/motorboat) come in through different sensory tracks than you'd expect (e.g., Charlotte could be seeing or…

If you depend on your car, don't get your gas at the cheapest place around. Try to get it at the place that's closest (or walking distance, at any rate) to your house—at least often enough that they know you as a regular customer. If your car ever refuses to start on a workday morning, those are the people who'll…

One of King's closest advisers, from the Montgomery bus strike onward, was Bayard Rustin, who was a gay activist back when being one (or just being out, even) took a lot more balls than it does now. King and Rustin also organized the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. A lot of people may have had a problem…

In Ohio, you can put them up for adoption. Are they healthy white polymers?

"A fetal heartbeat? That's cute, dear, what do you think that means? That fetuses have heartbeats? So abortion is bad? Did you know that if you take heart cells and grow them in a dish, like in a lab, when you get enough of them, they'll beat too? [1] So it's kind of a gimmick, isn't it? Do you think that means that…

It's a chicken-or-egg thing. Religious dogma does make people act mean, paranoid or illogical, but when it comes to truly batshit religious activity, chances are that (at least at the center) it involves people with genuine, honest-to-Ned, DSM-recognizible mental health problems—to which religion gives a "normalized"…