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Cognitive Enhancement

Margaret Talbot has a thorough and thought-provoking article in the New Yorker on the potential pitfalls of "neuroenhancing drugs". At this point, enhancement essentially consists of taking uppers (Adderall, Ritalin, Provigil, etc.) to improve concentration and focus. These drugs might have fancy new brand names, but the underlying concept is as old as caffeine and nicotine, which work by tweaking our neurons (often through the activation of excitatory neurotransmitters or, as in the case of coffee, by inhibiting our inhibitory neurotransmitters). Furthermore, there is a lofty literary…

The genetics of Scottish hair color variation

In the aughts the elucidation of human pigmentation genetics was of one the major successes of 'omic' techniques. The fact that humans exhibit some continuous variation in complexion was strongly suggestive that more than one gene was at work to generate the range of the phenotype. On the other hand pedigree based studies going back to the 1960s suggested that only a modest number of large effect genetic variants were producing the variance. Today we can say with reasonable certainty that about half a dozen genes account for almost all the between population variation in pigmentation. For…

NSF and "Senatorial Peer Review": one blogger's paranoid response.

Please notice that the title of this post promises a "paranoid response", not a careful analysis. It's one of those unscheduled features of this blog. Kind of like a snow day. Yesterday's Inside Higher Ed has an article about the U.S. Senate getting kind of testy with the director of the NSF about certain research projects the NSF has seen fit to fund. Regular readers know that I think we can have a reasoned debate about funding priorities (especially when that funding is put up by the public). It does not sound to me like the exchange in the Senate was that kind of reasoned debate. From…

Obesity and Food Culture

Razib has a super-interesting post on the prevalence of obesity among individuals of mixed race. His post was based on this paper: The sample included 215,000 adults who reported one or more ethnicities, height, weight, and other characteristics through a mailed survey. ... The highest age-adjusted prevalence of overweight (BMI greater than or equal to 25) was in Hawaiian/Latino men (88% ; n = 41) and black/Latina women (74.5% ; n = 79), and highest obesity (BMI greater than or equal to 30) rates were in Hawaiian/Latino men (53.7% ; n = 41) and Hawaiian women (39.2% , n = 1,247). The…

Tiger Woods

Like so many golf fans, I'd never even thought about watching golf on television until Tiger Woods. I don't play the game and the images of all those manicured greens and hushed crowds always struck me as incredibly boring. Why would I want to watch a game that seems to consist mostly of people walking? But then, one day, I saw Tiger play the game. And now I'm a PGA addict. I spent way too much of the weekend (and most of a Monday afternoon) camped out on my couch, watching Tiger and Rocco perform acts of finesse at the US Open that I can't even begin to comprehend. There's a certain…

"I'm not a scientist, man": Is Marco Rubio's science denial stupid?

After their thrashing in the 2012 elections, Republicans are casting about for a new standardbearer, and Marco Rubio is a leading candidate for that post.  One consequence of that attention is this GQ interview with Rubio, which includes this awesome exchange: GQ: How old do you think the Earth is? Marco Rubio: I'm not a scientist, man. I can tell you what recorded history says, I can tell you what the Bible says,but I think that's a dispute amongst theologians and I think it has nothing to do with the gross domestic product or economic growth of the United States. I think the age of the…

Missing the point

PZ Myers is disappointed. There's a massive oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico, BP is incapable of stopping it, as is the federal government, and the Gulf Coast from Louisiana to Florida (and soon on to Georgia and the Carolinas) are being coated in a chocolatey rainbow of crude oil. This is bad, and there's nothing that people who live in these areas can do about it, so there've been occasional calls for folks there to get together and pray. Now it's indisputable that PZ is unhappy with all of that, but he seems somewhat more vocal in his unhappiness with the people praying than he is with…

Do I repeat myself? / Very well then I repeat myself

PZ Myers doesn't care for Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future by Chris Mooney, Sheril Kirshenbaum. In objecting to it, he quotes Jerry Coyne's objection: I could find little in Unscientific America that has not been said, at length, elsewhere. Setting aside the merits of this claim for a moment (a full review will come shortly, but I'm in the midst of unpacking from one trip and getting ready to embark on another), this is a somewhat odd complaint for either of these men to level. Coyne, after all, is blogging in support of his recent book Why Evolution Is…

Genes which affect female development

There are several papers and letters in Nature Genetics on the relationship between menarche, menopause, etc. and genetics. Meta-analysis of genome-wide association data identifies two loci influencing age at menarche: We conducted a meta-analysis of genome-wide association data to detect genes influencing age at menarche in 17,510 women. The strongest signal was at 9q31.2 (P = 1.7 10-9), where the nearest genes include TMEM38B, FKTN, FSD1L, TAL2 and ZNF462. The next best signal was near the LIN28B gene (rs7759938; P = 7.0 10-9), which also influences adult height. We provide the first…

The social & genetic construction of race

Dienekes points to a paper by Yann, Estimating Genetic Ancestry Proportions from Faces: Ethnicity can be a means by which people identify themselves and others. This type of identification mediates many kinds of social interactions and may reflect adaptations to a long history of group living in humans. Recent admixture in the US between groups from different continents, and the historically strong emphasis on phenotypic differences between members of these groups, presents an opportunity to examine the degree of concordance between estimates of group membership based on genetic markers and…

Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend

Though Barbara Oakley's Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend is ostensibly about Machiavellian behavior, it is also a testament to her intellectual ambition. The subheading is a clear pointer to this. Oakley attempts to synthesize a wide range of fields, behavior genetics, cognitive neuroscience, clinical psychology, diplomatic history, evolutionary psychology, economic history, along with heavy dollops of political and personal biography, to produce a portrait of how Machiavellian intelligence emerges from its biological substrate…

Basic science: An "obstacle" to students who want to study medicine?

If there's one aspect of medical education that I consider to be paramount, at least when it comes to understanding how to analyze and apply all the evidence, both basic science and clinical, it's a firm grounding in the scientific method. I advocate science-based medicine (SBM), which is what evidence-based medicine (EBM) should be. SBM tries to overcome the shortcomings of EBM by taking into account all the evidence, both scientific and clinical, in deciding what therapies work, what therapies don't work, and why. To recap, a major part of our thesis is that EBM, although a step forward…

The Texas Medical Board vs. Stanislaw Burzynski, Round Infinity

There’s a point I feel that I have have to make briefly as I begin this post. Basically, this might look familiar, but given that I was at TAM Wednesday through Sunday, I didn’t have time to produce two separate posts, and this is important enough to be distributed as widely as possible. In any event, as I started writing this, I was on a miserably crowded, hot, stinky flight winging my way home from TAM (nothing like being stuck in coach on the tarmac in the middle of the desert before taking off—the sweat never quite goes away even after the plane cools down). This puts me in the perfect…

I fear for medical science under Donald Trump

It’s been two weeks since Donald Trump unexpectedly won the Presidential election despite losing the popular vote. Regular readers of my not-so-super-secret other blog know my opinion of this; so I won’t belabor it too much here. If you’re curious, I have written about Donald Trump’s antivaccine views here many times dating back to 2007, and, amusingly, I’ve even been at the receiving end of criticism from an “integrative medicine” activist in which my snark was compared to that of Donald Trump and my criticism labeled not just once, but twice. As you might imagine, I was not pleased. Leaving…

Torture is wrong

Cosma Shalizi, 11/4/2007: "The object of torture is torture": The point of this torture is not to extract information; there are better ways to do that, which we have long used. The point of this torture is not to extract confessions; there are no show trials of terrorists or auto-de-fes in the offing. The point of this torture is to exercise unlimited, unaccountable power over other human beings; to negate the very point of our country, to our profound and lasting national shame. This, it must be emphasized, is all that torture has ever been good for. Torture did not lead us to Osama bin…

Basic concepts - 8th grade math

Many fellow ScienceBloggers are doing a "Basic Concepts" series. Here are some of them: Mean, Median, and Mode Normal Distribution Force Gene Central Dogma of Molecular Biology Evolution Clade Instead of thinking up something new I've decided to repost a an older post where I cover the "basic" equations and models which I pretty much assume in many of my posts. The post below.... Begin repost Occasionally I appeal to formalizations or equations on this weblog to illustrate a general verbal principle. I don't do it to obscure or needlessly technicalize a topic of interest, but rather, it is…

Precision medicine: Hype over hope?

I am fortunate to have become a physician in a time of great scientific progress. Back when I was in college and medical school, the thought that we would one day be able to sequence the human genome (and now sequence hundreds of cancer genomes), to measure the expression of every gene in the genome simultaneously on a single "gene chip," and to assess the relative abundance of every RNA transcript, coding and noncoding (such as microRNAs) simultaneously through next generation sequencing (NGS) techniques was considered, if not science fiction, so far off in the future as to be unlikely to…

The justification for NCCAM: "What can be done to generate a better placebo?"

It's probably an understatement to say that I've been critical of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM). Indeed, I consider it not only to be a boondoggle that wastes the taxpayers' money funding pseudoscience, but a key promoter of quackery. Worse, its promotion of highly implausible (one might even say magical) modalities gives these modalities a patina of scientific respectability that they do not deserve, especially given that, even under the most favorable conditions possible, they routinely fail to demonstrate any efficacy above and beyond that of a…

Richard Dawkins' tin ear regarding bioethics: The execution of Saddam Hussein as an "act of vandalism"

It is with a bit of trepidation that I write about this. The reason, for anyone who reads ScienceBlogs specifically or science blogs in general, should be obvious. Richard Dawkins is such a polarizing figure with a penchant for stirring things up with regards to the most deeply held beliefs of both the religious and atheists, that he has all too often served as a flashpoint for battles between secularism and religion or a convenient excuse for the two most popular of my fellow ScienceBloggers to indulge their mutual animosity publicly. Posting about Dawkins, whether you defend or criticize…

A naturopathic cancer quack tries to silence criticism with legal thuggery

Regular readers know that, as a cancer surgeon, I become particularly worked up about stories of naturopaths taking care of cancer patients, which all too often end in disaster for the patient. I've lost count of how many naturopaths I've seen, either on their websites, in talks, or in published literature, claiming that they can cure cancer "naturally," using any of a number of unproven methods, an example being the Gerson protocol, a form of quackery involving 13 larges glasses of raw vegetable and fruit juice, around 150 supplements, and five coffee enemas a day, each and every day. Others…

Friday Random Ten, 11/06

Porcupine Tree, "Kneel and Disconnect": New Porcupine Tree! It's always great to get new stuff from these guys. It's good, but it's not up to the quality of their last two albums. (But given that their last two were utterly amazing, that's not much of a criticism.) Mind Games, "Royalty in Jeopardy": Some prog that I recently found via eMusic. They've got a sound that I describe as being sort of like a mix between Yes and Marillion. They're very good - I wouldn't put them in the top ranks of neo-prog, but they're not at the bottom either. Riverside, "Cybernetic Pillow": Now, these…

Friday Random Recipe: Moroccan Spiced Roast Duck

This recipe is based on a recipe for Moroccan spiced duck breasts, from The Soul of a New Cuisine, Marcus Samuelsson's new African cookbook. Chef Samuelsson is the guy who's responsible for getting me to eat beef after not touching the stuff for nearly two years. He's a very interesting guy - born in Ethiopia, but adopted as a baby and raised in Sweden. He's famous in NYC for being the chef at a Swedish restaurant, called Aquavit, where he was the youngest chef ever to get 3 stars in a New York Times restaurant review. A few years ago, he became interested in African cuisine, and spent a…

Ray Comfort Replies to Eugenie Scott

I could only get two paragraphs into that sleazebag's reply in the debate about his Origin giveaway before I had to close the window and throw him away. A major concern of Genie Scott was that the copy of On the Origin of Species sent to her by my publisher was missing "four crucial chapters," as well as Darwin's introduction. She will be pleased to know that the second printing of 170,000 copies (the one that we will give to students) is the entire book. Not one word will be omitted. Then perhaps Comfort should have acknowledged that it was a dishonest move on his part in the first place?…

Income Taxes and Speculative Bubbles

Ian Welsh makes a very important connection between personal economic incentives and corporate behavior: What would you do, or rather, what wouldn't you do, if you knew that by working hard for five years you'd have enough money that you need never, ever, work again for the rest of your life? Not just that, but for most executives, you would be rich. Want a house on the Riviera? Want to spend the rest of you[r] life travelling? Have a hobby? Whatever it is, you'll be able to indulge it, because you'll be rich and money is freedom. So even if, in the end, Merrill Lynch was going to be stuck…

What Is Science?

From the archives comes this comment on a question raised by microbiologist Paul Orwin--"What is science?": The only problem with Paul Orwin is that he doesn't post as often as I would like. He makes a great observation (italics mine): You've set yourself up a nice little system for examining the genome of an environmental isolate for genes involved in some important phenotype. Now, there are lots of ways to do such a thing, but lets keep it simple. You use a mutagenic technique (and there are many) to introduce random changes in the genome. You then use your powers of observation to…

One Reason Why I Blog

A friend asked today, "Why is there no one seriously critiquing the Gates Foundation's priorities?" Given the influence that "Gates" has on the setting of public health priorities, as well as the massive sums spent, these priorities need to be critically examined. For example, I've heard on the grapevine that one reason the Ellison Fund left the area of global health is because Gates moved in--they simply couldn't compete. Unfortunately, Ellison had a lot of experience and a very different approach than does Gates, so certain approaches to public health have been closed off. I know there…

The Crazy Twenty-Sixes

(from here) GrrlScientist is wearing yellow... GrrlScientist was trying to understand how 26% of Americans could think Dennis Hastert should suffer no consequences for covering Foleygate. I had some thoughts on the matter. Tonight, after looking through my neighborhood newspaper, The Beacon Hill Times, I propose an alternative hypothesis: they're batshit crazy. I've reprinted a letter to the Times, with all of the original language and grammar (such as it is). It's about a councilman's proposal to cover up the giant Citgo sign in Boston because Venezualan president Hugo Chavez insulted…

Friday Recipe: Stuffed Flank Steak

This is a recipe I created just a couple of weeks ago. I saw a beautiful Angus beef flank steak on sale, and wanted to find something to do with it. I came up with this idea of stuffing it. Amusingly, the day after it, a recipe appeared in the New York Times food section for a stuffed flank steak. But there's really nothing common between the two except the name. The basic idea behind this is that flank steak has a terrific flavor, but it can be a bit tough. So I wanted to do something to it that would make it tender, while taking advantage of that terrific flavor. The idea I came up with…

Open Letter to My Representatives

After reading Mike Dunford's letter to his representatives about the occupation of Iraq, I decided to write my own. Hopefully, it will have more influence than the other letters I've written... I recently read the following written by the husband of an Army officer currently deployed in Iraq, Michael Dunford, who supports the emergency war funding legislation that included a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq and is requesting of his senators and representative that they take an additional step and require that any additional funding for the current conflict be paid for through a tax increase…

The invention of algebra & the modern mind

Janet Stemwedel has a long post which elucidates various angles of the Cohen & algebra story. I agree with many of Janet's points, and I tend to believe that knowing algebra is an important necessary precondition for being a well rounded modern intellect. But I want to emphasize modern, I've mentioned before that John Derbyshire is writing a history of algebra, Unknown Quantity. Derb mentioned to me that though the Greek mathematician Diophantus lurched toward symbolic algebra 2,000 years ago, his work did not lay the seeds for any further developments because a scientific culture did…

The Complete Breakdown of Law Regarding Home Ownership: The Essex County, MA Edition

I haven't talked about Big Shitpile (the housing-initiated economic collapse in a while), but this report from the Essex County Register of Deeds (Massachusetts) describes nothing less than the breakdown of the property title system in the U.S.: Yesterday at the Annual Conference of The International Association of Clerks, Recorders, Election Officials and Treasurers (IACREOT), Register John O'Brien revealed the results of an independent audit of his registry. The audit, which is released as a legal affidavit was performed by McDonnell Property Analytics, examined assignments of mortgage…

Refusing to Cede the Moral High Ground on Abortion

When I return from the ASM2011 meeting, I hope to discuss this excellent post by Michael Bérubé about the political centrality of the culture wars. Until then, I'll leave you with the post from the archives, "Abortion Is a Blessing": Abortion isn't the lesser of two evils--it is a just and good thing. So says Reverend Katherine Ragsdale: Let's be very clear about this: when a woman finds herself pregnant due to violence and chooses an abortion, it is the violence that is the tragedy; the abortion is a blessing. When a woman finds that the fetus she is carrying has anomalies incompatible…

Well, OK, Some People Are Greater Vaccination Morons Than Others

In looking through the comments of Chris Mooney's recent post on vaccination denialism, I found this comment, which inevitably shows up in one form or another (italics mine; errors original): i grew up in the 1960s when less than a half dozen vaccines were required for infant protection spread out over the first few years of life. outside of a rubella outbreak, i recall no advrese effects on our infant populace, neither in mortality, serious disease contraction, nor mental disfunction. today there are well over 2 dozem vaccines required, sometimes given 6-8 at one time, spread out over 18…

Richard Dawkins - Islamophobe?

Richard Dawkins: Muslim parents 'import creationism' into schools: "Most devout Muslims are creationists so when you go to schools, there are a large number of children of Islamic parents who trot out what they have been taught," Prof Dawkins said in a Sunday newspaper interview. "Teachers are bending over backwards to respect home prejudices that children have been brought up with. The Government could do more, but it doesn't want to because it is fanatical about multiculturalism and the need to respect the different traditions from which these children come." Fact: a greater proportion of…

E. O. Wilson, Neville Chamberlain controversialist?

A profile of E. O. Wilson in The New York Times, Taking a Cue From Ants on Evolution of Humans: Dr. Wilson was not picking a fight when he published "Sociobiology" in 1975, a synthesis of ideas about the evolution of social behavior. He asserted that many human behaviors had a genetic basis, an idea then disputed by many social scientists and by Marxists intent on remaking humanity. Dr. Wilson was amazed at what ensued, which he describes as a long campaign of verbal assault and harassment with a distinctly Marxist flavor led by two Harvard colleagues, Richard C. Lewontin and Stephen Jay…

Godless elites?

My two posts on religion & IQ/education are getting a lot of attention. I didn't spend more than 30 minutes on both entries combined, so the attention to unit time invested ratio is rather out of wack. Doing some digging it's funny how interested people are in this topic, while at the same time being totally disinclined to do their own leg work. Multiple message boards have also pointed to another similar survey which shows the relationship between religiosity and IQs in international comparisons. You might be amused to find out that I wrote that up in 30 minutes 5 years ago as a joke…

On evolutionary words

Over at my other weblog, Gene Expression "Classic", I addressed the polemics of one David Stove, author of Darwinian Fairytales. I won't go into the details of Stove and that book, but if you follow the comment thread you will see that sometimes shit can be a very good fertilizer and give rise to food for thought. The comment thread made more explicit in my mind a few issues I have in regards to evolution. First, I hold to the scale independence of evolution, that is, there is no fundamental difference between microevolution and macroevolution. Macroevolution is in reality simply a…

Altruism & E.O. Wilson vs. Richard Dawkins

There have been a spate of articles about E. O. Wilson'sdrive to put group selection back into mainstream conversation among evolutionary biologists over the past year. Wilson has kept the torch alive for this particular paradigm since the 1970s, when it was prominently featured in his famous book Sociobiology. At the same time as Wilson was making waves in the United States Richard Dawkins debuted with The Selfish Gene, a book where he explored the new ideas of theoretical biologists W. D. Hamilton and J. M. Smith. Hamilton's model of kin selection, which he debuted in the mid-1960s,…

Why white people are so colorful!

Another day, and another genome-wide association study. Genetic determinants of hair, eye and skin pigmentation in Europeans: ...We carried out a genome-wide association scan for variants associated with hair and eye pigmentation, skin sensitivity to sun and freckling among 2,986 Icelanders. We then tested the most closely associated SNPs from six regions--four not previously implicated in the normal variation of human pigmentation--and replicated their association in a second sample of 2,718 Icelanders and a sample of 1,214 Dutch. The SNPs from all six regions met the criteria for genome-…

Donors Choose - let's represent!

Time to represent...no point pulling one's hair about the ignorance of the anti-evolutionist unwashed unless one is willing to do something about the problem, right? Small update: Props to those of you who have given so far! Small $$$ can go a long way. In any case, just so you know, everyone should feel free to give directly to whichever project they want to give to. If you do give to this weblog's Donor account, know that I'll probably throw most of the cash first to the genetics & evolution related stuff. [end update] Those of us who blog here at ScienceBlogs think science is cool,…

Why you be short or tall (well, a little bit)

Curious about height? Check out this new paper in Nature Genetics, A common variant of HMGA2 is associated with adult and childhood height in the general population. Nature News has a nice report for public consumption. Last week when I posted about heritable traits I used height as an illustrative example. The reasoning was pretty simple, it's a rather concrete phenotype which most humans have an intuitive grasp of in terms of the range of variation, and it also happens to exhibit high heritability in developed populations; on the order of 0.90, i.e., 90% of the variation in the…

Blue eyes came late too

In my previous post I highlighted the possibility that extremely light skin might have evolved in Europeans relatively recently due to selection for Vitamin D production in the context of a nutritional deficiency prompted by the shift from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to an agricultural one. I want to emphasize that the phenotype I was highlighting (skin color) was likely not the only response prompted by this selective force. For example, OCA2 seems responsible for about 75% of the variation in eye color in Europeans: The TGT/TGT diplotype found in 62.2% of samples was the major genotype…

Why bother with Jews and other odds and ends

Someone named Schvach Yid left an irritated comment in response to my post about the term Judeo-Christian. He also sent me a short email clearing up the fact that Judaism is more than legalism, and that it is steep to consider Jews non-Western. I think addressing these questions is worthwhile insofar as others might wonder what business a blog whose central theme focuses on evolutionary genetics has with venturing into topics such as the discussion of the history of Judaism and Christianity. First, the blog is an expression of my interests. My interests are rather broad. Though I tend to…

Canine eugenics

There is a somewhat confused piece in The New York Times about eugenics for dogs today. I say confused because the article offers various cautions, but connecting the dots from the facts littered throughout suggest easily why the cautions aren't warranted. One of the big issues lurking throughout the article is that of pleiotropy and correlated response, pretty important factors in directional evolution. The logic is simple, if a gene, A, has a quantitative impact on traits 1-100, selecting that gene specifically in the context of trait 23 will have unforeseen consequences for the 99 other…

Lactose tolerance, is it "dominant"?

Over at agnostic's blog p-eter points out that lactose tolerance can be considered "dominant." Most of you know I have issues with terms like dominant or recessive because I think the simple heuristic is infectious and tends to persist and spread throughout the discourse to the point where it obstructs rather than illuminates. That being said, I can see where he's coming from. We know a bit about the primary European mutation which confers the ability to digest milk as an adult. It's a cis-acting element which works to maintain transcription from the LCT gene, and so results in a level of…

I am offended!

Another day, another outraged Christian. Parents in a Utah school district were horrified to discover a link on the district web page to an evil essay: The new battle centers on a link on the district's Web page that was quietly removed on Feb. 16. Titled "America: Republic or Democracy?" the link led directly to an essay by William P. Meyers, a California-based writer who heralds his belief that Jesus Christ is one in a long string of "historic vampires." I, too, am deeply offended. Meyers doesn't know how to spell his own name, and everyone knows Jesus wasn't a vampire — he was a zombie.…

The Axolotl: Critical for Research, but Endangered

Where's axolotl? (Credit: Jan-Peter Kasper/EPA/CORBIS) Often, biologists talk about model systems: organisms that are particularly useful for research. One such organism is the axotol, Ambystoma mexicanum, a cool, but weird salamander: Because of their large egg and embryo size, susceptibility to tissue grafting, and ability to regrow severed limbs and tails, "axolotls have a long history as primary amphibian models, especially in research areas involving embryonic development," says Voss. He calls them a "re-emerging model organism" for scientists who study them with gene expression and…

Framing Good Transit Policy Poorly: The Efficiency Argument

One of the things that I don't write about much on the blog, but that I do follow with great interest is urban planning and transportation (yes, I need new hobbies). Among the glitterati of blogtopia (and, yes, skippy invented that phrase), there's a lot of discussion of how to develop better transporation policy. I find these posts to be really annoying, with the exception of Atrios who writes about his attempts 'to turn your suburb into midtown Manhattan' (he, at least has a sense of humor about it). I should be the last person to be annoyed by these posts. I live in a city, don't own a…

How Will the GOP Rebuild?

Not that this is a real concern of mine, but something Kos wrote a while ago about the possibility of Huckabee becoming the RNC party chairman interested me: But if Huckabee has the ground troops, what is he missing? The money. He got far in his primary race without any, winning Iowa with something like $27. But he won't be able to rebuild his party on shoe leather alone. Us Demcoratic rebels bypassed the Terry McAuliffe wing of our party by building our own alternate small-dollar fundraising mechanism. Without that cash, Dean would've never existed, and the establishment's favorite candidate…

If Wall Street Managers Don't Like Their Pay, They Could Always Become Scientists

I think this quote by Nell Minow sums up what most people feel about bonuses for employees at bailout-receiving investment banks: "I'm just flabbergasted that the financial community has failed to show any sense of leadership on this issue and doesn't seem to understand how angry people are at them,'' said Nell Minow, editor of Corporate Library, a Portland, Maine-based corporate-governance research firm. "They are just a bonus away from having the villagers come after them with torches.'' Actually, I think some people would like to skip the 'bonus away' and go straight to the torches…