Megan McCardle does a fine job of arguing that their really is no one to blame for the financial crisis. It’s a position I find compelling. In making her points she makes this observation which I wholeheartedly agree with and find to many people both on the right and left seem to forget.

It’s not that I don’t think bankers are greedy. I’m sure they are. I also think homeowners are greedy. I think community organizers are greedy. I think greed is a trait fairly evenly distributed throughout the human race, though the focus of that greed varies quite a bit. That makes it unsatisfying as an explanation for . . . well, almost anything. It’s like blaming the financial crisis on oxygen.

Is the greatness of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin a function of their intelligence or stubbornness? Don’t even dare answer with both.

Lost the link I got this from but it’s not mine.

Obama seems inclined to have the legal right to detainee non citizens indefinitely.

The Obama administration on Friday dropped the Bush-era term “enemy combatant” to describe its anti-terror prisoners …

… but vigorously defended its broad rights to hold detainees who provided “substantial” support to al-Qaida or the Taliban.

Justice Department lawyers said Obama can continue to hold the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay prison without criminal charges – much in the way President George W. Bush did.

Obama said during the campaign he would close Guantanamo Bay and has begun a process to shutter the military prison on the island of Cuba within a year. But in the legal filings Friday, his administration defended Obama’s powers to hold prisoners there, preserving that right even as Obama’s team tries to figure out what to do with the 241 men held there.

Critics of Guantanamo Bay prison were quick to say that Obama was backing off his pledge to change the policies of Bush. The Center for Constitutional Rights has released a response calling the DOJ’s decision “old wine in new bottles.”

“While the new government has abandoned the term ‘Enemy Combatant,’ it appears on first reading that whatever they call those they claim the right to detain, they have adopted almost the same standard the Bush administration used to detain people without charge,” said a statement from the group, which represents some of the detainees.

I look forward to my readers who were critical of Bush’s decision to be the same of Obama’s decision to maintain this option.

Clinton is ignorant of basic science.

He clearly is not fit to run our country.

Conceptualizing a trillion dollars is difficult for most of us, so someone rendered a 3D picture of what a trillion dollars would look like.

This particular rendering was made through Google SketchUp, Google’s 3D modeling software. Measurements were taken of a $10,000 stack of $100 bills (just half an inch thick!) and pretty much multiplied from there using simple geometry. In that trillion dollar shot, each pallet holds $100 million…and the pallets are double stacked.

Check out the little guy on the left for scale.

Does not require torture, according to veteran interrogators. 

One might think that any interrogation method considered legal must also be effective. But many techniques that have been deemed lawful by lawyers at the Justice Department, the Defense Department and even the White House have never been tested for how well they elicit information from people who resist providing it. In fact, none of the methods contained in the current Army manual on interrogation have ever been scientifically tested for effectiveness.

As military interrogators, each of us has questioned hundreds of prisoners of war, terrorists and insurgents in the Middle East, Latin America and Asia — during both Iraq wars and the 1989 invasion of Panama — and we have supervised thousands of other interrogations. While we speak only for ourselves, we have seen firsthand that many standard approaches are rarely useful in eliciting reliable intelligence, and often serve only to harden a detainee’s resistance. Widely employed tactics like “fear-up harsh,” which is meant to scare a person into answering questions, or “pride and ego down,” which uses humiliation to try to overcome a person’s resistance, are actually counterproductive in establishing the kind of relationship — one based on trust — that is almost always necessary to win a detainee’s cooperation.

The most effective strategies for relationship building are the kind that interrogators used to extract critical information from high-level Japanese and German prisoners during World War II. Interrogators who were familiar with the detainees’ language and culture, and who exhaustively studied each prisoner’s case, used charisma and empathy to patiently elicit vital intelligence. Similarly, it was a relationship-building approach that we used to persuade a detainee to give us information on the whereabouts of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the former leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia — information that led to his being located and killed in 2006.

In a socialism, I’m sure bureaucrats would plan to have one of these designed.

Those critical of pharmaceutical companies on the grounds that such firms waste resources on drug development that is not essential to improving the health of patients often point to viagra as the example. Why don’t they point to birth control?