Their rap triggers anxiety among Cherry Creek Schools administrators who prefer to tackle the achievement gap by training teachers to be attuned to the different cultures represented in the district.

"A new approach might distract from what we're doing," says district spokeswoman Tustin Amole. "The Brotherhood kind of sets us back."

...

Meanwhile, a districtwide Brotherhood summit set for next month has been scaled back from 1,600 kids — including third- and fourth-graders — to 400 older students.

"Telling young kids that most of you will fail, the worry is we're sending a message, however unconsciously, that we expect them to fail," Amole said.

Teaching self-worth makes sense. But those lessons mean something only if administrators allow them to be backed up with a clear-eyed look at the world.

"They don't realize that you can turn kids on by telling the truth," Richardson said. "Even if we have to go underground, we're not going to stop until we change the world."

Dear Amy: My girlfriend and I have been together for two years. This month she gave me an ultimatum: I give up hunting, or she leaves.

Every year, my best friend and I spend the opening weekend of deer season in a cabin we built on his family's land. It is the only weekend I hunt, and I look forward to it every year. My friend and I don't get to spend much time together, so this weekend has been our excuse to get together, catch up and have a good time.

My girlfriend told me this year that she doesn't want to be with someone who could kill a deer. I tried to explain that hunting helps control deer population in the absence of natural predators and that hunting is a better way of acquiring meat than buying beef slaughtered in an industrial farm and shipped across the country.

Dear Befuddled: Your letter is why ultimatums don't usually work.

(If I could, I'd issue an ultimatum against ultimatums.) This issue will come up each hunting season; you now have a year of peace in which you can attempt to work out a compromise (and where ultimatums don't usually work, compromises almost always do).

Would your girlfriend be as unhappy if you went on this hunting excursion, enjoyed the experience but didn't kill anything? Could you square your ethical hunting argument to keep the peace at home? You could start by presenting these two extremes with the goal of taking baby steps toward each other until you meet somewhere near the middle.

Casper Star -- Demographers say thousands of people like Kerr are heading to the Rocky Mountain West in their later years. Forget the warmth of Florida and Arizona. Baby boomers, in particular, are gravitating toward the peaks and sagebrush basins of Wyoming and Montana, promising to turn these states from relatively young into two of the nation's oldest.

They're drawn by low crime, fresh air, little traffic and abundant outdoor activities, said Larry Swanson, an economist and director of the Center for the Rocky Mountain West in Missoula, Mont.

Although people of all ages like those things, older people tend to be flexible enough in their careers, families and finances to finally kick up their boots on a porch rail, he said.

MADISON, N.C., December 26, 2007 – Remington Arms Company, Inc. (“Remington” or “ the Company”) the only manufacturer of both firearms and ammunition for Hunting, Law Enforcement/Security, Government & Military applications in the United States, today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Marlin Firearms Company, Inc. (“Marlin”). The transaction is expected to close by the end of January 2008.

Marlin, headquartered in North Haven, Connecticut, also owns Harrington and Richardson (H&R), New England Firearms (NEF) and LC Smith brands of rifles and shotguns.

Tommy Millner Remington’s CEO, said, “I am pleased to announce that Marlin’s well known brands with a long heritage of providing quality rifles and shotguns to hunters and shooters around the world will join the Remington family. The opportunity to combine two historic U.S. based companies with such storied and proud histories, is both challenging and exhilarating.”

DenverPost -- Home prices in 20 U.S. metropolitan areas fell in October by the most in at least six years, raising the risk that more Americans will walk away from properties that are worth less than they owe.

Values fell a greater-than-forecast 6.1 percent from October 2006, the S&P/ Case-Shiller home-price index showed Wednesday. The decrease was the biggest since the group started keeping year-over-year records in 2001.

In metro Denver, home values declined 1.8 percent in October from a year earlier, continuing an 11-month streak of year-over-year price declines.

WASHINGTON - The housing market plunged deeper into despair last month, with sales of new homes plummeting to their lowest level in more than 12 years.

...

Over the last 12 months, new-home sales nationwide have tumbled by 34.4 percent, the biggest annual slide since early 1991, and stark evidence of the painful collapse in the once high-flying housing market.

...

The median sales price of a new home dipped to $239,100 in November. That is 0.4 percent lower than a year ago. The median price is where half sell for more and half for less.

...

Would-be home buyers have found it more difficult to secure financing, especially for "jumbo" mortgages _ those exceeding $417,000. The tighter credit situation is deepening the housing slump. Unsold homes have piled up, which will force builders to cut back even more on construction and look for ways to sweeten the pot to lure prospective buyers.

...

The housing market has been suffering through a severe slump following five years of record-breaking activity from 2001 through 2005. Sales turned weak as did home prices. The boom-to-bust situation has increased dangers to the economy as a whole and has been especially hard on some homeowners.

Foreclosures have soared to record highs and probably will keep rising. A drop in home prices left some people stuck with balances on their home mortgages that eclipsed the worth of their home. Other home buyers were clobbered as low introductory rates on their mortgages jumped to much higher rates, which they couldn't afford.

Erie, Colorado -- The standard advice to make a loud noise to scare off lurking or approaching coyotes is being questioned by some in Erie, where two dogs were killed and a woman was injured in an attack by a pack of the animals Sunday.

A few residents in town are beginning to feel like coyotes are losing their innate fear of humans, and that deterrence measures such as banging pots and pans or shouting at the animals are not having the effect they used to.

The latest attack, which took place in the backyard of a home in the Airpark neighborhood, is one of several that have been reported in Erie over the last few months — and the first involving a human injury.

Edward Burnett Tylor proposed that human cultures developed through three basic stages, savagery, barbarism, and civilization. Although this seems crude and ethnocentric, this was an advancement over the biological/theological belief that the more primitive societies of the world were at the stage of barbarism because they had fallen from grace.

"The 2 percent increase was the strongest increase since 1982, the end year of the oil boom," Wenlin Liu, senior economist with Wyoming's Economic Analysis Division, said in a release. "This was not a surprise, because it just followed the substantial job growth of 4.9 percent in 2006."

The 4.9 percent job growth was the highest since 1981.

Wyoming's population growth has been lagging behind the increase in jobs for quite a few years.

The strong growth in population, Liu said, should have brought some relief to the state's severe labor force shortage.

"Methane hydrate was a key cause of the global warming that led to one of the largest extinctions in the earth's history" says Ryo Matsumoto, a University of Tokyo scientist who has studied frozen gas since 1987.

I've been down this road more times than I care to count. But the truth is that much of the public debate over gun rights and gun control is disingenuous. Gun owners of every stripe -- liberal, moderate, conservative -- and non-owners alike can and do agree that violent criminals, juveniles, terrorists and mental incompetents have no right to firearms. Federal and state laws, despite poor enforcement by the courts, underscore that. Further, there's no significant debate -- nor should there be -- over private ownership of guns for lawful purposes such as target shooting, hunting, self-protection and collecting.

Gun Owners of America and its supporters took a knife in the back yesterday, as Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) out-smarted his congressional opposition into agreeing on a so-called "compromise" on HR 2640 -- a bill which now goes to the President's desk.

The bill -- known as the Veterans Disarmament Act to its opponents -- is being praised by the National Rifle Association and the Brady Campaign.

The Brady Bunch crowed "Victory! U.S. Congress Strengthens Brady Background Check System." The NRA stated that last minute changes to the McCarthy bill made a "good bill even better [and that] the end product is a win for American gun owners."

But Gun Owners of America has issued public statements decrying this legislation.

The core of the bill's problems is section 101(c)(1)(C), which makes you a "prohibited person" on the basis of a "medical finding of disability," so long as a veteran had an "opportunity" for some sort of "hearing" before some "lawful authority" (other than a court). Presumably, this "lawful authority" could even be the psychiatrist himself.

Note that unlike with an accused murderer, the hearing doesn't have to occur. The "lawful authority" doesn't have to be unbiased. The veteran is not necessarily entitled to an attorney -- much less an attorney financed by the government.

The Schumer scheme would update federal law in the United States concerning the ownership of guns, and restrictions on those who can own firearms. A decades-old law creates a ban on gun ownership for anyone who has been adjudicated to be mentally defective, Eric Pratt, a spokesman for Gun Owners, told WND. It was intended to be used in cases when a person is declared innocent by reason of insanity in criminal cases.

However, the proposed update would allow that "adjudication" to be determined not only by a court but by any competent authority, which could include a Veterans Administration psychologist, any panel of psychologists or a wide range of other possible "competent authorities."

It also would automatically include people on a federal no-gun-ownership limit who have been diagnosed with some behavior-related childhood conditions, and in a provision that is especially objectionable to the Gun Owners organization, any veterans diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

With all the negativity and apprehension engulfing this nation, it's a wonder any of us can be thankful this year.

Today's compliant American citizen trembles in fear at the slightest sign of peril.

You know, if Osama doesn't get us, Chinese toys certainly will.

All this doom and gloom has manifested in the rise of populist politics, an unfortunate movement that seizes on every morsel of bad news it can exploit for political power.

You, on the other hand, are left to sit, curled up in the corner, agonizing over the proliferation of Mountain Dew, Mexican gardeners after your job, lead in your lipstick and polycarbonate bottles — whatever that is.

Now, no one can deny that we're a nation dealing with a multitude of crucial problems. We are, after all, home to Miss South Carolina, Dennis Kucinich and "Dancing with the Stars."

Still, it's no reason to panic.

The CBI's InstaCheck program handled 1,306 checks in 12 hours on the day after Thanksgiving, so-called Black Friday for its potential to put retailers in the black for the year.

Dig a deep well, fit it with a hand pump, and you can provide up to 2,800 gallons of safe water a day for as many as 300 people! In many communities, clean water lies hundreds of feet below layers of hard rock. Children have no choice but to drink disease-infested water from surface lakes and ponds. When our drilling teams strike water, entire villages erupt in celebration because a clean water source can cut a community’s child mortality rate in half.

The inability to admit that mental illness is a major part of what causes homelessness in San Francisco (and a lot of other big cities around the country) means that the leftist screeching about "housing" ends up obscuring that for many of the homeless, having housing only solves one small part of the problem--and then, only as long as they can manage a place of their own.

The pleasant little theory about deinstitutionalization was that the severely mentally ill would end up back in their communities, receiving community-based psychiatric treatment. It didn't happen, because many of the mentally ill are not sufficiently well--or at least, not consistently so--to hunt up all the social services that they need to keep from freezing to death, or dying of pneumonia, or getting murdered by either other mentally ill homeless people, or common thugs looking for a thrill. As much as the mental hospitals of the 1950s were denigrated as horrible institutions, they at least simplified the providing of basic services to many of the most seriously disturbed parts of our society. What we are doing today in places like San Francisco is not only cost inefficient, it is profoundly inhumane.

The principal at my own son's school expects--and I kid you not--that [when attacked by a bully] students will curl up on the ground into a fetal position and hope that someone else goes running for help.

Several conservation and recreation groups have accused the U.S. Forest Service of trying to do administratively what couldn’t be accomplished in Congress: changing the rules about access to forest lands to benefit outfitters and guides, to the detriment of self-guided recreationists.

Representatives of River Runners for Wilderness, Wilderness Watch and Wild Wilderness say the Forest Service has taken allocation of wilderness permit concepts from a bill crafted by Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, and are trying to introduce those concepts via countrywide rule-making.

...

Early versions of the Craig bill viewed nonprofit outfitters such as the Lander-based National Outdoor Leadership School as competing with for-profit outfitters for a limited and increasingly precious commodity -- permitted days to operate in wilderness areas. That’s one reason the bill never went anywhere, Nickas said.

Craig’s bill did succeed in pressuring agencies including the Forest Service to consider administrative changes, Nickas said, and that’s when nonprofit outfitters became allies, rather than foes.

Just a few weeks ago, Scripps Howard News Service and Ohio University released a little-noticed study showing that one-third of Americans now "believe in a broad smorgasbord of conspiracy theories" revolving around government complicity in everything from the Sept. 11 attacks to the Kennedy assassination.

The same survey last year found that "anger against the federal government is at record levels." It would be easy to chalk up these troubling findings to the unending propaganda of fear. America has been experiencing the searing blast of politicized terror warnings and breaking news graphics for the better part of six years now, and populations living under such constant government and media shock treatment can go a wee bit berserk.

Aspen, Colorado -- "Fire," two toddlers shout, tugging their parents toward the community hearth in the heart of downtown Aspen. Little do these tykes know, as they warm their mittened hands, that these flames represent a burning controversy.

Should the community hearth on the Cooper Avenue mall keep burning fossil fuel, wasting energy and emitting carbons, or should it be snuffed in the interest of doing what's good for the Earth?

The technological singularity is a hypothesized point in the future at which the rate of technological growth approaches infinity. Moore's Law is often cited to assist in the prediction of the date of the singularity. Theorists are increasingly of the opinion that the singularity will occur via the creation of artificial intelligence (AI) or brain-computer interfaces, of smarter-than-human entities who rapidly accelerate technological progress beyond the capability of human beings to participate meaningfully in said progress. Futurists have varying opinions regarding the timing and consequences of such an event and "The Singularity" has featured prominently in work by a variety of science fiction authors.

EDUCATION, n.
That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.

It seems plausible that with technology we can, in the fairly near future, create (or become) creatures who surpass humans in every intellectual and creative dimension. Events beyond this event—call it the Technological Singularity—are as unimaginable to us as opera is to a flatworm.

The preceding sentence, almost by definition, makes long-term thinking an impractical thing in a Singularity future.

However, maybe the Singularity won't happen, in which case planning beyond the next fifty years could have great practical importance. In any case, a good science-fiction writer (or a good scenario planner) should always be considering alternative outcomes.

To get along with machines, Dr. Norman suggests we build them using a lesson from Delft, a town in the Netherlands where cyclists whiz through crowds of pedestrians in the town square. If the pedestrians try to avoid an oncoming cyclist, they’re liable to surprise him and collide, but the cyclist can steer around them just fine if they ignore him and keep walking along at the same pace. “Behaving predictably, that’s the key,” Dr. Norman said. “If our smart devices were understandable and predictable, we wouldn’t dislike them so much.” Instead of trying to anticipate our actions, or debating the best plan, machines should let us know clearly what they’re doing.

DENVER (AP) -- A grand jury declined to indict an off-duty sheriff's deputy over a roadside fight that left a Montana man dead, all but eliminating the possibility that charges will be filed, prosecutors said Monday.

David Rossiter, 25, of Sheridan, Mont., was shot to death Nov. 2 in a fight with Arapahoe County Deputy Daniel Montana, 49.

The grand jury didn't issue a report that might have explained the decision. Prosecutors said the case is essentially closed unless new evidence surfaces, and they are not actively investigating.

...

District Attorney Scott Storey said he did not know the grand jury's reasoning and could not comment even if he did because state laws require the process to be secret.

"This was a very, very thorough, complete and meticulous investigation from start to finish, and the grand jury assisted in that process and the investigation," he said. "They had all the information. Nothing was left out."

Storey said more details of the shooting could be disclosed, but he declined to elaborate.

WASHINGTON -- U.S. Sens. Mike Enzi and John Barrasso have joined with 45 colleagues in the Senate in pushing to allow gun owners to carry their firearms into all national parks and wildlife refuges.

Among the Wyoming Republicans' allies: Montana Democratic Sens. Max Baucus and Jon Tester.

Forty-seven senators signed a letter to Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne on Friday asking him to lift restrictions that prevent citizens from carrying their readily accessible firearms onto lands managed by the National Park Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The effort is being led by Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho.

...

Opponents of the change argue that it would lead to more poaching and accidental shootings in the parks.

The letter noted that the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service allow transporting and carrying of firearms on their lands in accordance with the laws of the host state. It added that a similar exception for parks and refuges "would respect the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding gun owners, while providing a consistent application of state weapon laws across all land ownership boundaries."

...

"If you live in Cooke City and you go hunting near Bozeman, there's a pretty good chance you're going to transport a gun through a national park," he said. "Jon believes law-abiding Montanans have a constitutional right to haul firearms through parks without having to break them down."

...

Current regulations only state that weapons must be rendered inaccessible, said Jerry Case, chief for regulations and special park uses for the Park Service. That means they do not have to be disassembled, but instead simply must be put somewhere not readily accessible, such as in a car trunk, he said.

"They don't have to be broken down, but they have to be inaccessible," he said. "Preferably they're in your trunk and unloaded. Our regulations do allow people to transport weapons through a park as long as it's not accessible."

Most of the other governments insisted that the cuts be made at home. But Gore demanded a series of loopholes big enough to drive a Hummer through. The rich nations, he said, should be allowed to buy their cuts from other countries. When he won, the protocol created an exuberant global market in fake emissions cuts. The western nations could buy "hot air" from the former Soviet Union. Because the cuts were made against emissions in 1990, and because industry in that bloc had subsequently collapsed, the former Soviet Union countries would pass well below the bar. Gore's scam allowed them to sell the gases they weren't producing to other nations. He also insisted that rich nations could buy nominal cuts from poor ones. Entrepreneurs in India and China have made billions by building factories whose primary purpose is to produce greenhouse gases, so that carbon traders in the rich world will pay to clean them up.

Such a ban was approved in 1994 under the Clinton administration with the support of former Presidents Reagan, Carter and Ford. Yet, President George W. Bush, who declared his support for the ban in 2000, caved to the gun lobby and allowed it to expire in September 2004.

Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
-- Ben Franklin

"False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand real advantages for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience; that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it; that has no remedy for evils, except destruction. The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm those only who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. Can it be supposed that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity, the most important of the code, will respect the less important and arbitrary ones, which can be violated with ease and impunity, and which, if strictly obeyed, would put an end to personal liberty--so dear to men, so dear to the enlightened legislator--and subject innocent persons to all the vexations that the guilty alone ought to suffer? Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man. They ought to be designated as laws not preventive but fearful of crimes, produced by the tumultuous impression of a few isolated facts, and not by thoughtful consideration of the inconveniences and advantages of a universal decree."
-- John Adams, quoting Cesare Beccaria's 1764 "On Crimes and Punishments"

DENVER—Denver International Airport is looking into ways to cut its multimillion-dollar electricity bill.

In the future, most providers of online music will not likely go to the effort to create comprehensive liner notes like the ones that accompany Folksongs of Illinois -- or to hire artists like McAdams to do the cover illustrations. While the recordings will survive as a series of 1s and 0s, the often lavish packages they used to come in will fade away. And while the brave new world will be more efficient -- and will use up fewer natural resources -- I'm still going to miss well-designed, thoughtfully produced efforts like this.

DenverPost -- The Democratic Party chairman in Wyoming is predicting that Democratic candidates throughout the Rocky Mountain region will be damaged if his party selects Hillary Clinton for president.

"Every Democratic candidate in Wyoming will be painted with that same liberal, big-government brush. We will also be the target of the locker room jokes that rightfully belong to Bill Clinton," John Millin wrote in a letter to The Denver Post.

"While I don't agree with this view of Mrs. Clinton, I have to accept that this is the truth. It has become the dirty little secret in the Democratic Party," he wrote. "Westerners have an independent, libertarian spirit and Democrats can make Republicans pay a heavy price for years of pandering to the social conservatives. None of this will happen if Hillary wins the nomination."

Kathleen Parker -- In the politics of race, black and white isn't so black-and-white anymore.

Rather than a matter of skin tone and pigmentation, race has become a question of blackness and whiteness — a calculation of attitude, experience and cultural identity.

Our first hint that the race card had found a new game was when writer Toni Morrison called Bill Clinton "our first black president." "Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and- junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas." At the risk of contradicting Morrison, but for the sax, those are white-trash tropes. Toss in a banjo and you've got "Deliverance."

...

This race business is complicated.

"... the problem with society may not be who has guns, but who doesn't."

WASHINGTON — Best Buy Co. Inc., Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and six other retailers will sell equipment enabling owners of analog television sets to continue to view programming after the 2009 nationwide switch to digital broadcasting, the federal government said Tuesday.
Starting Jan. 1, an estimated 13 million to 21 million households that rely on an antenna to watch TV can contact the government to receive two coupons worth $40 each to buy converter boxes.

The $1.5 billion program—which is enough to fund 33.5 million coupons—ends March 31, 2009.

CHEYENNE -- A program that began in Wyoming to help stem bullying in schools was presented at a national crime prevention conference this week.

The Bullying Hurts Program stresses positive youth development and prevention to combat bullying. It teaches, among other things, that bullying is a part of life, violence toward bullies is not a solution, and support for bullying victims is key to helping them deal with it.

Post Poll - Do you own a gun?

Total Votes = 1961
Yes, more than one -- 795 Votes, or 40.54%
Yes, one -- 157 Votes, or 8.006%
No, but I used to -- 74 Votes, or 3.773 %
No -- 893 Votes, or 45.53 %
I don't know -- 42 Votes, or 2.141 %

An implicit premise of de Grey’s argument is that a longer life is a better life, and that the longer the better, and even longer, even better. My own experience, and that of observing my elderly peer group, is that–at least if one lives into advanced adulthood, say, 55-65–there is no obvious correlation between length of life and satisfaction with life. The Roman philosopher Seneca noted many centuries ago that “it is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given for the highest achievements if it were well-invested…. Life is long if you know how to use it.” Those words were written when the average life expectancy was 30 and one was considered was considered [sic] old at 40. He was right then and his words are still true today. [emphasis added]

What would it be like to experience the continued vitality of the body in conjunction with the aging of the spirit? Would it mean the best of both worlds: the vitality of youth with the wisdom of maturity? Or the worst of both worlds: the characteristic vices of age with the strength of will to impose them on others?

My standing complaint against de Grey and his enthusiastic colleagues is that they defend themselves by hypothesizing a variety of changes in our present way of life that would make our extended lives a kind of heaven on earth. We would be so healthy and energetic we would want to keep working indefinitely. We could start new careers, new families, new ways of life. That we might get tired of it all, or bored, is not allowed into their calculations. Nor is any imaginative effort to imagine the deleterious social effects allowed. Healthy, affluent people even now usually want to retire from work, not continue indefinitely, and poor people whose work is drudgery want it even more. But they would be forced to continue workinh unlesd [sic] society and their children were prepared to support them for hundreds of years. Social mobility in every human society has depended on the old making way for the young.

Suppose we were to devise a feasible anti-aging intervention that, once developed, would postpone both good and bad late deaths by a modest but non-trivial amount – ten or twenty years, say. Suppose, further, that both the development and the provision of this intervention were very expensive. The ethical arguments against such expenditure are far more reasonable than those that I have demolished above. Specifically, one might point to the much more limited improvement in overall quality of life (because, since early deaths would still be in the minority, the average time spent debilitated before death would be unchanged). One might defensibly conclude that the societal drawbacks of such a measure – increasing the rich/poor health divide, in particular – outweighed these much more modest health benefits, and even the very large economic benefits of keeping the population healthy for longer.

Two people were fatally shot at a housing complex for missionaries in training at 12:30 a.m. Sunday in Arvada. Thirteen hours later, at Colorado Springs' evangelical New Life Church, a parishioner was killed and four people were injured before the shooter was shot dead by a New Life security guard. [emphasis added]

I visited with folks in the oil and gas community who speculate that the North Platte valley lease nominations were a hoax perpetrated by someone in the environmental community. Why? Well, to show that they can muscle industry out of high-value areas.

I also visited with folks in the conservation community who speculated that it was hoax perpetrated by someone in the energy industry. What better way to show that the industry has made concessions than to nominate leases in a high-value area knowing that it will spark a very public uprising?

Of course, there's always the possibility that someone knows something about the geology there that's been overlooked all of these years. But what's interesting about that sort of speculation?

The division between paleolibertarians, centered around the Mises Institute, and cosmopolitan libertarians, centered around Cato, is also a case of "culture clash," according to Justin Raimondo, editorial director of Antiwar.com and prominent member of the Mises set. "There's the populist wing of the libertarian movement, and then there's the Washington crowd that's still trying to sell libertarianism, or their version of it, to elites. These people want to go along and get along. As long as they can abort their babies and sodomize each other and take as many drugs as they want to, they are happy. They don't care who is being killed in Iraq and how many Iraqis are dying. That's their hierarchy of values."

For the record: I decline the term "libertarian" in political self-description -- mainly for fear of guilt by association.

"I frankly would reach beyond just my party, the Democrats, and say that my sincere hope is that I wouldn't have to vote for any of these people, on either side," Freudenthal told The Associated Press in an interview this week.

...

"I have yet to hear one talk about the impact of the declining dollar in terms of what it has done, and its contribution to the price of oil," Freudenthal said. "It just seems to me from watching the debates and listening to this stuff is all discouraging. I think if your children behaved that way at Thanksgiving dinner, you send them to their room." [emphasis added]

We should be suspicious of any document that suddenly gives the Bush administration a pass on a big national security problem it won’t solve during its remaining year in office. Is the administration just washing its hands of the intractable Iranian nuclear issue by saying, “If we can’t fix it, it ain’t broke”?

As recently as 2005, the consensus estimate of our spooks was that "Iran currently is determined to develop nuclear weapons" and do so "despite its international obligations and international pressure." This was a "high confidence" judgment. The new NIE says Iran abandoned its nuclear program in 2003 "in response to increasing international scrutiny." This too is a "high confidence" conclusion. One of the two conclusions is wrong, and casts considerable doubt on the entire process by which these "estimates"--the consensus of 16 intelligence bureaucracies--are conducted and accorded gospel status.

"... it was stolen last Thursday."

“If you don’t believe the Lord has a sense of humor just look at the fellow sitting next to you”

Corruption is a strong word. But consider these facts: The gimmick behind Wednesday's debate was that the questions would be selected from those that ordinary Americans submitted to the video sharing Internet website YouTube, which is owned by Google. According to CNN, its staff culled through 5,000 submissions to select the handful that were put to the candidates. That process essentially puts the lie to the vox populi aura the association with YouTube was meant to create. When producers exercise that level of selectivity, the questions -- whoever initially formulated and recorded them -- actually are theirs.

THIS is intellectual venality, but it pales beside the wickedness of using some crackpot's query about the candidates' stand on Biblical inerrancy to do something that's anathema in our system -- to probe people's individual religious consciences. American journalists quite legitimately ask candidates about policy issues -- say, abortion -- that might be influenced by their religious or philosophical convictions. We do not and should not ask them about those convictions themselves. It's nobody's business whether a candidate believes in the virgin birth, whether God gave an oral Torah to Moses at Sinai, whether the Buddha escaped the round of birth and rebirth or whether an angel appeared to Joseph Smith.

The latter point is relevant because CNN's noxious laundering of this question through the goofy YouTube mechanism quite clearly was designed to embarrass Mitt Romney -- who happens to be a Mormon -- and, secondarily, to help Mike Huckabee -- who, as a Baptist minister, had a ready answer, and who happens to be television's campaign flavor of the month.

Beside considerations like these, CNN's incompetent failure to weed out Democratically connected questioners pales.

But there was one avoidable problem with our Beauchamp fact-check. His wife, Reeve, was assigned a large role in checking his third piece. While we believe she acted with good faith and integrity--not just in this instance, but throughout this whole ordeal--there was a clear conflict of interest. At the time, our logic--in hindsight, obviously flawed--was that corresponding with a soldier in Iraq is logistically difficult and Reeve was already routinely speaking with him. It was a mistake--and we've imposed new rules to prevent future fact-checking conflicts of interest.

And, in light of the evidence available to us, after months of intensive re-reporting, we cannot be confident that the events in his pieces occurred in exactly the manner that he described them. Without that essential confidence, we cannot stand by these stories.

On the Standard website and elsewhere, there was speculation that Scott Thomas might not be an active-duty soldier at all. The Standard described a lengthy "semiotics-based analysis" arguing that he "fits the profile of a creative writing program graduate." I tried to convince Beauchamp that he could buy credibility and knock down these specious claims with one gesture: revealing his name. A week after the initial call from Goldfarb, Beauchamp finally agreed.

Beauchamp has lived through this ordeal under the most trying of conditions. He is facing pressures that we can only begin to imagine. And, over the course of our dealings with him, we've tried to give him the benefit of the doubt. Ever since August, we've asked him, first though his wife and lawyer and later via direct e-mail and phone calls, to personally obtain the sworn statements that the military had him draft and sign on July 26. And, ever since then, he has promised repeatedly to do just that. We are, unfortunately, still waiting.

PORTSMOUTH, N.H. - When the hostages had been released and their alleged captor arrested, a regal-looking Hillary Rodham Clinton strolled out of her Washington home, the picture of calm in the face of crisis.

The image, broadcast just as the network news began, conveyed the message a thousand town hall meetings and campaign commercials strive for — namely, that the Democratic presidential contender can face disorder in a most orderly manner.

"I am very grateful that this difficult day has ended so well," she declared as she stood alone at the microphone.

PRINCETON, NJ -- Republicans are significantly more likely than Democrats or independents to rate their mental health as excellent, according to data from the last four November Gallup Health and Healthcare polls.

CNN admits it erred by using a YouTube question by a retired general who serves on a campaign committee advising Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.). Given the Clinton camp's history of planting favorable questions at her own town halls, it's understandable that many would wonder if the general was a plant to ask a tough question of the Republicans. (Both he and the campaign deny it.) And CNN drew more attention to him by putting him in the studio audience and giving him the microphone at one point. That led to all sorts of "outing" of other questioners who, it turned out, support Democrats.

But lost in all this Google gotcha is this: Why should candidates be shielded from being asked questions by people who don't necessarily agree with them? Isn't that what a "town hall" is supposed to be all about? Shouldn't a future president be tough enough to face dissent? Won't a future president be president of all the people? In the old days, when candidates had real town halls that weren't moderated by television stars, real voters could show up and ask questions even of candidates they didn't support. Somehow the assumption now seems to be that Republicans should only face questions from Republicans and, presumably then, Democrats should only face questions from Democrats. But at the CNN/YouTube debate featuring Democrats earlier this year, there were questions from obviously conservative voters - one from a gun rights advocate comes to mind - and why should they not have to explain to a gun owner why they support restrictions on their ownership? [emphasis added]

"Minutes after the debate CNN's Anderson Cooper said Kerr's appearance was a mistake. "Certainly, had we had that information we would have acknowledged that in using his question, if we had used it at all."

But, General Kerr may not have been the only one who slipped in without being fully identified.

Softball for Dems: Who was your favorite teacher?

Softball for Repubs: Which taste better, Iraqi babies or Afhgan ones?