The Relatively Speaking Edition OTB Caption ContestTM is now over.

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OTB and especially our Gone Hollywood sideblog have been getting swamped with traffic the last couple of days and it’s quite literally overheating our dedicated server. We had an outage yesterday afternoon and are operating quite sluggishly now and it’s not even 9 a.m. on the East Coast yet, which means the peak traffic is [...]

In a rare act of compassion, Health Officials in Fairfax County, Viriginia, have begun stringently enforcing health codes to ensure that homeless people don’t get food poisoning. Under a tough new Fairfax County policy, residents can no longer donate food prepared in their homes or a church kitchen — be it a tuna casserole, sandwiches [...]

Speaker of the House-Designate has sent out an email to her caucus announcing a House Democratic Forum on Iraq [PDF] to be held Tuesday, December 5. The featured panelists? Rep. Ike Skelton, Ranking Member, Armed Services Committee Rep. John Murtha, Ranking Member, Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor Richard Holbrooke, former [...]

WorldNetDaily’s Joseph Farah has done some hard-hitting statistical analysis and found that a substantial share of the murders and drunk driving fatalities in the United States each year are caused by illegal aliens. While the military “quagmire” in Iraq was said to tip the scales of power in the U.S. midterm elections, most Americans have [...]

Time for the Thursday OTB Caption ContestTM REUTERS/Brendan McDermid (UNITED STATES) Winners will be announced Monday PM

Today’s Washington Post summarizes an impending Clean Air Act case regarding the EPA’s authority to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. The Bush administration is defending its refusal to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from new motor vehicles in the first case about global warming to reach the Supreme Court. The Environmental Protection Agency lacks the power to [...]

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Tom Friedman, a supporter of the war from the beginning who has become rather infamous for repeatedly saying we would turn the corner in X months,* now has set forth a new metric: 10 months or 10 years. Either we just get out of Iraq in a phased withdrawal over 10 months, and try to [...]

Yegor Gaidar is seriously ill after contracting some mystery ailment in Ireland. Yegor Gaidar, architect of Russia’s market reforms, was being treated in a Moscow hospital on Wednesday after coming close to death with a mystery ailment during a visit to Ireland, friends and family said. Former acting prime minister Gaidar, 50, who unleashed economic [...]

Bill Frist is giving up politics, at least for the time being, and has ruled out a White House run for 2008. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said Wednesday he will not run for president in 2008, the most high-profile campaign dropout among Republicans more than a year before the first convention delegates are chosen. [...]

As promised Moqtada al-Sadr and his delegation have walked out of the Maliki cabinet. A bloc of Iraqi lawmakers and cabinet ministers allied with militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr launched a boycott of their government duties Wednesday to protest Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s decision to attend a summit in Jordan with President Bush. “We announce the [...]

It looks like Wesley Clark is running again for president. Wesley Clark said Tuesday he wants to avoid waiting too late to make a decision on whether to run for president — a mistake he made in his failed 2004 bid. “I think it was clear that I got in too late last time,” the [...]

Dan Drezner recently attended his 20th high school reunion and offers several interesting observations. Among them: 1) Physically and emotionally, the men will have changed much more than the women. This is mostly physiology — boys mature later, and are the ones who go bald. Plus, if they’re very, very lucky, the men will also [...]

“He’s not a typical politician. He really has deep convictions.” – Senator Chuck Schumer discussing Senator-elect Jim Webb’s cantankerous nature and how it may impact his ability to get along in Washington.

Xlrq, a lawyer with a hard-to-pronounce name and too much time on his hands, examines the legal ramifications of parent-child labor relations vis-a-vis minimum wage laws, income tax withholding, and the 13th Amendment’s prohibition against involuntary servitude. In a separate post, he considers whether the District of Columbia is in violation of the Constitution‘s requirement [...]

John Keegan, defence editor of the London Daily Telegraph and arguably the most important military affairs writer of his generation, contends that the chaos in Iraq is not a civil war. He contends as I have for some time (See, for example, my Dec. 2004 TCS essay “Civil War Enthusiasts“) that in addition to violence [...]

Glenn Reynolds has an interesting essay in Popular Mechanics about the proliferation of SWAT teams and the transformation of police forces into paramilitaries. The trend toward militarizing police began in the ’60s and ’70s when standoffs with the Black Panthers, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and the University of Texas bell tower gunman Charles Whitman convinced [...]

A federal district court judge in Washington has ruled that Federal Reserve Notes must be redesigned to allow the blind and visually impaired to more easily distinguish between denominations: U.S. District Judge James Robertson said keeping all U.S. currency the same size and texture violates the Rehabilitation Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of [...]

Nancy Pelosi has told Alcee Hastings that he will not be chair of the House Intelligence Committee in the new Congress and he has dropped his bid for the office. Democratic Rep. Alcee Hastings of Florida, impeached as a federal judge in 1989 on corruption charges, dropped his bid under pressure on Tuesday to chair [...]

Dennis Prager is hopping mad that Keith Ellison wants to take his oath of office on the Koran rather than the Christian Bible. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., the first Muslim elected to the United States Congress, has announced that he will not take his oath of office on the Bible, but on the bible of Islam, [...]

Some may not be aware of this but there is a rather tragic story unfolding in Atlanta Georgia. An 88 year old woman was shot in what looks like (at best) a botched no-knock raid (link to original story) Here are the facts that I am aware of. An elderly woman, Kathryn Johnston, lived alone [...]

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Sean Hackbarth has passed the 1 million mark on SiteMeter since installing it on his blog The American Mind. Congrats!

My wife forwarded me this one: How to prank a Telemarketer. I’ve seen this kind of thing before but this fellow, Tom Mabe, is more creative than most.

Michael Gordon and Dexter Filkins report that Hezbollah is training al-Sadr’s Shiite militia. A senior American intelligence official said Monday that the Iranian-backed group Hezbollah had been training members of the Mahdi Army, the Iraqi Shiite militia led by Moktada al-Sadr. The official said that 1,000 to 2,000 fighters from the Mahdi Army and other [...]

The Washington Times has an extensive report on the incident last week where imams returning from a conference in Minneapolis were removed from a US Airways flight and subsequently banned from the airline. It is entitled “How the imams terrorized an airliner.” Muslim religious leaders removed from a Minneapolis flight last week exhibited behavior associated [...]

Dafna Linzer and Thomas Ricks report that the Marine Corps has all but given up in western Iraq. The U.S. military is no longer able to defeat a bloody insurgency in western Iraq or counter al-Qaeda’s rising popularity there, according to newly disclosed details from a classified Marine Corps intelligence report that set off debate [...]

Congressional Quarterly’s Craig Crawford appeared on “Hardball” yesterday speculating that Dick Cheney might “head for the hills” soon. Think Progress has the video and a partial transcript. CRAWFORD: I still wonder if he stays in this administration for the full term here. I really wonder if Rumsfeld’s leaving is just the beginning. MATTHEWS: Well, who [...]

TOR Books and John Scalzi are offering free copies of The Ghost Brigades for active duty servicemen in Iraq and Afghanistan. So: If you’re currently serving in Iraq or Afghanistan and would like to receive an electronic edition of The Ghost Brigades to read and (hopefully) enjoy, all you have to do is send an [...]

The Outstanding in His Field Edition OTB Caption ContestTM is now over.

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Ben Stein, he of “Ferris Bueller” and “Win Ben Stein’s Money” fame, had a meeting with mega-billionaire Warren Buffett and came away thinking that we should tax rich people more. Mr. Buffett compiled a data sheet of the men and women who work in his office. He had each of them make a fraction; the [...]

Over the past year there were predictions about how bad hurricanes were going to get (example). That we should expect more and stronger hurricanes. One problem though, so far this hurricane season is one of the least active in decades. So what happened? Lots. Storms were starved for fuel after ingesting masses of dry Saharan [...]

As expected, Mike Shula has been fired as head coach of the Alabama Crimson Tide football team. Alabama has fired coach Mike Shula, whose Tide struggled to a 6-6 regular season finish in his fourth year but enjoyed a 10-2 record the season before, a newspaper reported. Shula told his assistant coaches late Sunday night [...]

I came across a job announcement for Program Coordinator for US and International Politics at GWU’s Elizabeth J Somers Women’s Leadership Program via an email from the Chronicle of Higher Education. While I’m qualified to teach in the fields and the campus is just down the road from me, I get the idea that I’m [...]

New York Congressman Charlie Rangel was on Fox News Sunday yesterday continuing to flog his faux “plan” to initiate a draft. He rejected Chris Wallace’s citation of Heritage Foundation statistics showing that Army recruits are more educated and come from more affluent backgrounds than the population as a whole: I want to make it abundantly [...]

The Iraq Study Group, headed by James Baker, will recommend overtures to Iran and Syria in an effort to solve the crisis. A draft report on strategies for Iraq, which will be debated here by a bipartisan commission beginning Monday, urges an aggressive regional diplomatic initiative that includes direct talks with Iran and Syria but [...]

Time for the Monday OTB Caption ContestTM (AP Photo/Yonhap) Winners will be announced Thursday PM

The New York Times is on the case of yet another group who’ve been oppressed by The Man and aren’t going to take it any more: the obese are the latest group to stake a claim on a research program within the academy: Even as science, medicine and government have defined obesity as a threat [...]

Don Boudreaux has an excellent article in the Pitsburge Tribune-Review on statistics and how one has to be careful with reading statistics. Here’s an example: Go back to 1977, the year America began its current string of annual trade deficits, and look at what’s happened since then to manufacturing employment as a percentage of total [...]

We have officially reached a milestone that has been bandied about in the press the last few days. The YahooNews headline gets it as close to right as any: “U.S. involved in Iraq longer than WWII.” The war in Iraq has now lasted longer than the U.S. involvement in the war that President Bush’s father [...]

If people had to pay tolls everywhere they drove, they’d drive less according to a recent study. While the main finding was rather obvious, the study has some interesting implications. For about eight months, drivers in 275 Seattle-area households agreed to pay for something the rest of us get for free: The right to drive [...]

UK Tory leader David Cameron recently made a speech that American readers might find curious coming from a “conservative.” Conservative leader David Cameron has promised to get tough on the causes of poverty, as he set out his plans to end what he dubbed a “moral disgrace”. While Labour had relied on the “clunking mechanisms [...]

Steve Bainbridge has made his return to the blogosphere with a new design and three blogs instead of two: Professor Bainbridge’s Business Associations Blog This is my professional blog, which serves as an extension of my academic scholarship. The subjects about which I post here – law, business, and economics – will be of interest [...]

An interesting article on charitable giving via Greg Mankiw. The conventional wisdom runs like this: Liberals are charitable because they advocate government redistribution of money in the name of social justice; conservatives are uncharitable because they oppose these policies. But note the sleight of hand: Government spending, according to this logic, is a form of [...]

David Ignatius is dishearted by what he terms “The Politics of Murder” in his beloved Lebanon and throughout the Middle East. A disease is eating away at the Middle East. It afflicts the Syrians, the Iraqis, the Lebanese, even the Israelis. It is the idea that the only political determinant in the Arab world is [...]

Weekend Caption Jam Linkfest. . . and now also Saturday Traffic Jam for those who wish to link. Rodney has a different kind of turkey contest Wizbang likes to strut its stuff. Willisms welcomes our new liberal overlords The Man thinks birds of a feather… Bullwinkle will have “none” of this. The Gone Rick Motel [...]

TIME magazine has chosen its “All-TIME 100 Albums.” Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” doesn’t make the cut. Kanye West’s “The College Dropout” does, along with an inordinate number of anthologies. I would argue that their methodology is flawed.