Sadly, I have to go out and can't participate in this Saturday night thread, but following some links from Stanley's place, I came across this page, where the question is asked,

what is that called when guys rub their cocks up and down a girl's buttcrack ? everything else has a name like rim jobs, blowjobs, footjobs, etc.

Maybe you wouldn't think that the crowd at adultdvdforum would come up with some awesome terms, but they do. Not more awesome than you guys could do, but damn good.

Halfway through my thirties and I just bought my first "sportcoat." It's a very deep brown and I'm not ashamed to say that I love it. (Purchased from my go-to store for dress up. Did Jackmormon ever tell us whether her honey liked what she bought for him there?)

Why did I buy a sportcoat, you ask? Because I finally managed to get a reservation at the French Laundry for a time that my mom would be in town. And thanks to the surpassing kindness of the Mineshaft, it'll be very nearly free. I'm going on Friday, and you can expect a recap over the weekend. Thanks, all.

John Cale plays Satie on the teevee in 1963:

Nevermind.

I think I'm going to go back to shutting up about it.

A new indie scene is cropping up right in its midst, just like the one that brought you Bad Brains and Fugazi: check it out, mang. Surely, Washingtonian will have, or perhaps already has had, a take on it?

(via.)

Stretching: might be worthless, might be bad for you. Turns out, nobody really knows. (And I've been thinking about this lately because I noticed about a month ago that when I was stretching every day, my breaststroke-endangered groin muscle was more likely to hurt after a swim, so I've scaled back to once every few days and don't have problems anymore.) I love stories like this, where some bit of common sense turns out to be (ok, possibly) wrong.

But distance runners do not benefit from being flexible, he found. The most efficient runners, those who exerted the least effort to maintain a pace, were the stiffest.

That study involved 100 people who were tested with 11 flexibility tests. Then they walked and ran while the researchers measured their efficiency. Those who were the most flexible expended 10 to 12 percent more energy to move at the same speed as compared with the least flexible.

Now, obviously, there are some things you just can't do without flexibility. Dancing and tae-kwon-do come to mind. And there are things you can't do well without it, like swimming. But stretching before a run is the iconic stretch and it turns out that it might actually be bad for you. Love it.

A friend of the blog writes:

Dear Mineshaft,

I need help with what I fear is a sartorial lost cause: I have fair hair and skin, and live in a sunny clime. Over the past years, I have noticed definite and increasing propensity to sunburned scalp underneath that thinning hair. But the pate is not so bare that I could use sun lotion. I need a hat.

I won't wear a baseball cap (or any of its variants) because I'm not Down with the Kids, a trucker, or a professional athlete. So.... granting that all available alternatives will make me look like a tool, which would make me look least toolish?

Assume for the sake of argument we're talking about something that would go with a traditional professional white-collar American man's wardrobe. (And that would adequately offset my codpiece.)

Yours ever,

Craving a Styling Top

Because this is a friend of the blog, we won't make fun of the way his moniker suggests the Men Seeking Men column of the local personals. Instead we will open the floor to helpful suggestions.

Of course we're all too high-minded to care, but no way is this woman 105 pounds. Compare.

It's funny and charming to poke fun at yourself when your foibles are relatively harmless, but to joke chummily with people who, like you, don't appreciate the gravity and aren't personally affected by what you've done, and when what you've done is no joking matter, you only confirm that you and your lackeys in the press are moral monsters.

Ezra has a post up agreeing with Tyler Cowen that an underdiscussed social benefit of prostitution is the fact that it enables the customers to satisfy their desire for sex. I disagree that it makes sense to count this as a social benefit, and I've got some thoughts on this under the fold. (Under the fold so that those who'd prefer to skip the sanctimony can do so easily.)

I'm going to start by introducing a distinction between desires that it's wrong to satisfy, and desires that it's wrong to have. (As I said, not a libertarian, and this is going to be sanctimonious moralizing.) There are things I'd like to own that I can't afford; I don't steal to get them because it would be wrong (and partially because of legal penalties), but I don't believe that wanting them is in any way wrongful. And there are occasionally people who make me angry and sometimes I'd like to physically hurt them; I don't do it because it would be wrong (and partially out of cowardice, given that any sort of violence would almost certainly turn out very badly for me) and I think the desire to hurt people (without their enthusiastic consent; I'm not talking about BDSM) is in itself wrongful, whether or not satisfied. Better not to satisfy it, of course, but best of all not to have it.

And you get cases that are hard to call. For entertainment, I like books, and movies, with a certain amount of violence in them. Mystery novels, thrillers, movies where things blow up and people get hurt. This enjoyment doesn't bother me, morally, because it's contigent on the violence not being real -- a James Bond movie that was also a snuff film, where the dozens of filmed deaths were real, wouldn't be more desirable entertainment, that I'd really like to watch but am restrained from by knowing it would be wrong, it'd be straight up horrifying and repugnant. Someone for whom a snuff movie would be better, rather than worse, entertainment seems to me to be indulging a morally wrong desire even when they watch fantasy violence; the fantasy violence itself is neutral, but someone whose enjoyment of it is contingent on wishing it were real disturbs me, even if they recognize the wrongness of actually satisfying their desires.

Further, there seem to me to be areas where indifference to the ill effects is enough to render a desire wrongful. Take a boxing fan, for example. Someone who actively enjoys the fact that there's a chance they could end up seeing one of the boxers die in the ring, or knowing that there's a good chance that the boxers are suffering permanent brain injuries, is doing something wrong. Someone who enjoys boxing knowing those facts, who wouldn't strongly prefer rule or equipment changes that would make the boxers safer (assuming the sport is otherwise unchanged), seems to me to be doing something wrong in pretty much the same way. Getting pleasure from people while indifferent to the fact that they're injured by the process seems to me to be wrong. This isn't about consent; boxers are obviously fully consenting participants in boxing matches, but it's still wrong to enjoy watching them get hurt while being indifferent to their welfare.

Which finally gets us to the sex industry. For the vast majority of people, having undesired sex is the sort of thing that's perceived as a serious injury regardless of consent; someone in a marriage where they feel obligated to have sex despite being repulsed by their spouse, or someone being pressured into sex as a quid-pro-quo in the workplace, despite being in some sense a consenting participant, is undergoing a fairly horrible experience. That's probably not true for everyone, it's a big world out there and there are almost certainly some people who don't find undesired sex significantly unpleasant. But for any individual, the odds are strongly in favor of it being true*.

This means that someone whose desires for sex can be satisfied by sex with a prostitute is someone whose desires either incorporate or are indifferent to the fact that it's likely to be a painful and unpleasant experience for the prostitute. (Or they're a culpably self-deceiving moron; not in believing that some prostitute for whom the life isn't a horrible one exists, but in believing that they know that to be the case for the specific prostitute with whom they're having sex. I'll allow for an exception in the case of long-term commercial relationships in which it wouldn't be insane for the customer to believe they have a real understanding of how the prostitute feels about the transaction, not that I know anything about this, but it seems possible.) Desires like that -- desires for sex that are indifferent to injury to the sex partner -- seem to me to be wrongful in themselves.

The conclusion I'm drawing from this is that to the extent the analysis above stands up, I view the sort of desire for sex that's capable of being satisfied by sex with partners who don't desire the experience, whether or not they consent, as wrongful, and I'm not prepared to view the opportunity to satisfy those desires as a social good that prostitution accomplishes†. This would not be a better world if Spitzer could have openly paid to get his rocks off with a young woman doing her best to pretend that she wasn't repulsed by the experience. This doesn't get me to any immediate policy conclusions; I generally end up thinking that something like the Swedish model, in which prostitution would be more legal than it is now, is the best idea from a harm reduction point of view. And a persuasive argument could probably convince me that full legalization might be the best way to reduce harm. But I'm still not going to believe that patronizing prostitutes is a morally neutral act, such that allowing people to satisfy their desires to do so is a good thing.

* Is this a necessary fact of human nature? Beats me: maybe in some other culture people would be relaxed enough about sex that undesired sex wouldn't be a repugnantly unpleasant experience. But I'm confident of it as a contingent fact about most people in our culture.

† If it matters, the argument is genderless. Once you start talking about specifics, it's hard to keep gender out of it, but my basic sense that wanting to have sex with someone while being indifferent to whether they'd find the experience pleasurable or horrific is wrong doesn't rest on the gender of the people involved.

Fascinating list of the blogs that people in the media read. I don't have a fully formed theory, other than that entrenched blogs seem to be entrenched, but how appropriate that in our debased discourse, Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Reynolds, two people who seem to be incapable of going a day without making a disingenuous argument, are by far the most widely read. The other thing that struck me was the absence of Yglesias; I guess they think he's just a young punk, and don't want to be confronted with their own inadequacy.

Originally from a paper by Henry Farrell and Dan Drezner.

Meh: Turns out the data is from late 2003.

Shut up, it's therapeutic. Riffing off some stroke length/stroke count drills I've been doing with the Coach, I've been trying to do a 50 breaststroke in 8 strokes and 40 seconds. I'm not really close (44 seconds), but it's fun! Try it! All of you!

Tonight we're going to swim some butterfly (we'll, he's going to make me swim some butterfly, and ask--rhetorically, one hopes--whether they still have a death penalty in California). In some ways it's the most fun stroke to swim; it's all-body and powerful, but there's no getting around the fact that you're repeatedly slamming your face into the water. You don't have to swim butterfly. Any of you.

The obsession with your own poo phenomenon is news to me, and this Salon article actually does a really good job with it. First you get a sense of the phenomenon.

Reading Richman and Sheth's book is similar to pulling an enormous ball of wax out of your ear. Although you know you should be disgusted, you can't stop looking at and obsessing over it. Quite simply, theirs is a fascinating read. ("Two thumbs up! Gripping and loaded!") You feel relieved to get to the bottom of so many rectal mysteries, to find out that certain bathroom experiences -- sometimes seemingly weird and extraordinary -- are not signs that you're a freak of nature.

When a kernel of corn makes its rear exit and comes out perfectly intact, it's not a personal failing that proves you're a bad child who didn't listen to his mother and failed to chew properly. Instead, this common phenomenon, "deja poo," refers to certain foods like corn that have insoluble fibers that are difficult for even the most efficient digestive tract to break down. "Regularity" spans the range from three times a day to three times a week. And a case of nerves -- whether before an important business meeting or a performance -- can induce "performance enhancing poo."

Of course there's the health angle.

"When I do an initial assessment of someone's overall health, I really focus on their digestion and I often find myself getting down to the nitty-gritty when it comes to bowel movements," she says. Seemingly unrelated health problems, including skin rashes, allergy symptoms and hormonal imbalances, can have their root in the gut, an assertion that's supported by recent mainstream biomedical research. "Over and over again, I find that by fine-tuning someone's digestion, other health issues can improve dramatically," Miller says.

But then the article turns to experts who expertly deflate the whole thing.

Dillard also points to the current fad for "detoxing" the body by regularly getting high colonics as an obsessively unhealthy one. "This is a manifestation that a part of you is dirty," he says. "The colon has been around million of years and the wisdom of the colon predates us. This notion that we can somehow always intervene in some way so we can be intellectually or psychically or physiologically superior to this part of the body is kind of foolish."

And...

"Parents are trying to control their children, corporations are trying to control workers, and on an individual level, we're trying to control our bodies, including our poop: when we poop, how often we poop and what we poop, including the right size, consistency and color." As with all fads that strive toward the perfect body -- be it the face, the pecs or the wardrobe -- Lipkins says we're missing something essential.

That seems exactly right to me; I like that she places new-agey health movements that are supposed to be "alternative," squarely inside the broader culture of control. People who are really happy are people who don't worry about every little quirk of their bodies.

Venkatesh (he's like our buddy now) breaks down high-end prostitution into three tiers, and says that in going through a service, Spitzer was patronizing the least exclusive ("Tier 1"), and least discreet, of the three.

"Tier 2" includes women who charge up to $7,500 for a session. These women tend to be white, they may have a college degree (or be actively enrolled in school), and they usually require a referral before they will take on a new john. They also have a small, exclusive clientele, sometimes as few as a dozen men whom they service. Unlike Tier 1 workers, they do not rely on escort agencies, so they keep all of their money.

Finally, there are the "Tier 3" sex workers, who can charge in excess of $10,000 per rendezvous. They may have only four or five clients, and they typically charge their clients an additional monthly surcharge for their various needs--rent, clothing, medicine.

Both Tier 2 and Tier 3 workers can typically do more to safeguard a client's privacy. There are no guarantees, of course, but they tend to shun contractual relationships with agencies that advertise their services. There is less of a paper trail. They typically will only take a john via a referral, and even then, they may require that the john "date" them for weeks before deciding to offer up sex. I have heard of Tier 2 and 3 sex workers who vet prospective clients for months, sometimes hiring a private detective to see if the john is stable--psychologically and financially. As a former attorney general, Spitzer must have known all this.

Via Yglesias I see that John McCain wants to ban MMA fighting.

McCain, a lifelong boxing fan, was horrified at the ground fighting, kicks, and head butts. It was "barbaric," he said. It was "not a sport." He sent letters to all 50 governors asking them to ban ultimate fighting. The outcry against "human cockfighting" became a crusade, and like many crusades, it was founded on misunderstanding.

McCain sat ringside at a boxing match where a fighter was killed. When I asked him to explain the moral distinction between boxing and ultimate fighting, he exploded at me, "If you can't see the moral distinction, then we have nothing to talk about!" Then he cut our interview short and stormed out of his office.

Old man doesn't get it.

Can we retire the headshaking about how someone who's supposed to be as smart as Spitzer could have done something so stupid? I've known an awful lot of very bright people -- people keep telling me I'm fairly clever myself -- and they (including me) are just as likely to do cripplingly idiotic things as anyone else. Particularly when it involves their sex lives or emotional lives.

On a more general level, I have a theory (which I may have explained in comments before) that people have at least two uncorrelated sorts of intellectual capacity. There's how smart you are: your ability to process information, make difficult intellectual leaps, and so forth. And then there's how stupid you are: how likely you are to do completely boneheaded things that any idiot should have known not to do. People I've known who've been very practically successful seem to manage it more not by being startlingly brilliant, but by being only reasonably bright, while having very, very low levels of stupidness. The capacity to not fuck up is very rare, and has very little to do with startling intelligence.

I just got dumped.

Alas. She found my close relationship with my exes (like being trustee of part of ebl's daughter's estate, but especially my continued friendliness with the ex) incomprehensible and threatening. It's not a crazy concern; we are close, and ultimately I couldn't reassure her that there was nothing to worry about, even though there really and truly isn't.

Alas. She's a sweetie, we had a wonderful time, and I sure will miss her.

Prediction: I start swimming three times a day.

Request: Hold the sympathy, it'll just make me feel pathetic. Let's talk about any trusting teenage daughters you have instead.

How do folks with Comcast cable and their new DVRs like them? (Assume this is all non-HD, because I don't feel like getting an HDTV just yet.)

I have DirecTV, but my receiver died and I got a used one off eBay, thinking they'd just activate it for me, but no, they want to charge me $20 to send me an "access card" that's identical to the one I have. It's just a way for DirecTV to make some money from the eBay trade in used receivers. I realize $20 is just 1.5 cherimoya and I'm profligate, but I don't like feeling ripped off. I like the receiver because it has TiVo software, but maybe it's time to upgrade anyway. Yadda yadda, what say you?

You cannot stop Ackerman's horndogging, you can only hope to contain it. Doesn't he have a real job now? What is he doing at Jezebel, publishing his IM conversation with their blogger?

$PENCER: the most important thing of all:
are you going to come to DC this weekend to see my band play?
That's right, Jezebel readers: I am asking Moe out on a date ON HER OWN BLOG
IN PUBLIC
though i suppose you could edit that out, but wouldn't THAT be crappy

He's a monster. That's off the record. In a follow-up, he defends himself from charges of cheap-bastardism.

Hey, check out our own Joe Drymala's Obama-inflected musical.

*

This is quite odd: an essay by David Mamet in which he announces that he is no longer a "brain-dead liberal." I'm not sure which part he's given up.

These cherished precepts had, over the years, become ingrained as increasingly impracticable prejudices. Why do I say impracticable? Because although I still held these beliefs, I no longer applied them in my life. How do I know? My wife informed me. We were riding along and listening to NPR. I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the fuck up. "?" she prompted. And her terse, elegant summation, as always, awakened me to a deeper truth: I had been listening to NPR and reading various organs of national opinion for years, wonder and rage contending for pride of place. Further: I found I had been--rather charmingly, I thought--referring to myself for years as "a brain-dead liberal," and to NPR as "National Palestinian Radio."

It seems to be one of those cases where someone rejects some crazy thoughts and falsely believes that giving up the crazy thoughts requires all sorts of other revisions.

Says Spitzer's wife (who's totally hot, by the way),

"Eliot and I had been to the Whitney and were looking at a Jackson Pollock, and he said, 'I could do that,' " Ms. Wall Spitzer said, imitating her husband with a braggadocious tone.

Good riddance to him then.

And: What you get for $4,300. Discretion and an educated woman, mostly. And does this Venkatesh dude get all the plum sociology gigs or what?

That promise of quality often includes good looks, a clean bill of health and the ability to serve as a charming conversationalist and elegant companion at social functions. In some cases, experts said, this Hollywood fantasy can actually be true: Sudhir Venkatesh, a professor of sociology at Columbia University who has interviewed prostitutes in New York City, said some of them left behind highly skilled jobs.

Venkatesh said his research showed that, in more than 40 percent of the liaisons between johns and prostitutes at this high price point, no sexual intercourse actually occurred. "It's an expensive conversation" in some cases, Venkatesh said. "It happens a lot more than we think."

Josh Marshall says that Fallon was too sane for the White House.

A guest poster at Rootless Cosmopolitan, no hotbed of Republicanism, says no, he was just a self-aggrandizing media hound.

Neither story has any reporting, so keep believing whatever you believed fifteen seconds ago.

I love that "NY Good Day" is on the screen the whole time.

Mary Ann busted for pot.

I'm totally in a teaching slump-- everything I touch turns to muddled and uninteresting. It's almost eerie. Part of the problem is just being too busy, so instead of reading things over carefully or rethinking things I just go with my old notes. Another problem is (forgive me) a clunky group of students; this sets a tone that I have a hard time changing.

What's the way out of this? I'm trying to keep my game face on no matter what, but I don't exactly have a big bag of tricks to reach into at this point.

Hey Bay Areans, wanna kitty?

It's bpl's cat, and he's great, but he's actually too social and affectionate for her schedule, which keeps her away from home so much that she feels guilty about leaving him alone. And if you're not looking for a cat, surely you know someone who is? Email me.

Just assume it's all spoilers from here on out.

Not that I have any myself. I just want to get the ball rolling, but consider this a thread for observations, links, whatever. I expect that this will be the first of several posts, as we all have a chance to think about the show.

1. Season 5 was weak, but not as weak as all that. The fate of the boys was done very well, and even the homeless subplot had a believable conclusion.

2. The newspaper stuff lacked moral nuance, and I can't really defend it as on a par with the rest of the show. I didn't find it unbelievable, but I did find it uninteresting.

3. It would be strange for the show to get an Emmy after its weakest season, but Andre Royo deserves one. He's been deserving one, but they better give it to him this year.

4. Inertia. People and institutions keep doing what they do. If you're looking for the politics, you have to look at the places where someone overcomes inertia, and find what it took for them to do it. Namond and Bubbles are the best examples. None of the institutions overcomes inertia.

5. God, I love this show. I expect I'll watch the whole thing, from beginning to end, several more times.

This Bloomberg article on the increased duties of the Secret Service due to the enormous crowds turning out for the Democratic primary is interesting on several levels, but what caught my eye the most were the code names given by the Secret Service. Hillary Clinton is "Evergreen," Barack Obama is "Renegade," and Michelle Obama is "Renaissance." I do wonder what the point of the code names is, if they're going to give them out to the press, but then I'm not a security consultant.

At least so averred someone at the Brickskeller; I believe it was Witt. And this is going to be almost totally substanceless, consisting as it will, or, by the time you read this, does, of nothing by a few sentences telling you about some things to which I've recently been listening. How interesting is that? Super interesting. Super, like, duper interesting.

1. Tim Berne has one of the most instantly recognizable sax styles in contemporary jazz, and his near-constant accompanist Tom Rainey one of the most instantly recognizable drumming styles.
2. I somehow got the idea, I think from Alex Temple, though he is not, I'm sure, to blame for this misapprehension, that cLOUDDEAD were basically like Dälek except a little less caustic. But, prompted by this review, I listened to Ten by that band and Why?'s Elephant Eyelash, and they're both terrific, and not Dälek-like at all (which is not to disparage Dälek!—even though I now see that, while I thought I had From Filthy Tongue of Gods and Griots, I don't, though I do have their album with Faust, Derbe Respect, Älder. It is good!). In fact, the Why? album kind of reminds me of my only partially inaccurate recollections of Fog's Ether Teeth. (Not that they sound particularly similar, although occasionally they do, but they are like-minded.) Emerson will surely have some reaction to knowing that the refrain of one of the songs on that album is "We're goats we eat tin cans / We're carp we eat tin cans".
3. I don't care what anyone says, this is a good song.
4. Last Exit and Otomo Yoshihide's New Jazz Orchestra are also good; in fact, very good! The ONJO/ONJQ renditions of Jim O'Rourke's "Eureka", of which at least four different versions have been recorded, two each by the Orchestra and the Quintet, far surpass O'Rourke's. Here is an example, from the ONJQ Live album.
5. The David Thomas Broughton vs. 7 Hertz album is pretty hot.

First of all, Eliot Spitzer is an ugly guy.

Second, he's making that face that guilty public figures make. I'd link to an old post on this topic, but it's gotten to the point that I can't even find my own posts anymore. Shouldn't we shut this thing down already?

Aha!: Found it! Reprieve.

Karl Rove's dad was gay? Jesus Christ.

Different, and funnier, recounting of the event here.

Police also were forced to remove two people after they tried to perform a citizen's arrest on Rove for what they said were his crimes while a member of the Bush Administration.

Sweet.

He really is a crap human being.

People also walked out throughout the night, including a wave of people after Rove said "it is funny that a guy wearing a Palestinian symbol around his neck would be talking to me about blood on my hands."

What was Spitzer thinking? I'm always amazed by such foolhardy decision-making; there is, after all, as Diogenes pointed out, an easy cure for sexual desire. And yet we see this sort of thing all the time.

I've wondered why we haven't heard more about Condoleezza Rice as McCain's running mate. Seems downright inevitable to me, frankly.

As we're finding out in the Democratic primary campaign, it's very difficult to attack a woman or an African-American in ways that don't offend a lot of people, and this would be particularly true with Rice because the main criticisms of her personally are that she's incompetent and a liar; charges that are true but whose very unpleasantness makes them difficult to broach.

Yglesias had a post last week on congestion pricing as a means of reducing traffic, arguing that it was a mistake to worry that it was harder on the poor, because to the extent that it works, it's going to relieve them of the costs of traffic and leave them better off, and anyway it's redistributive because poor people own fewer cars than rich people. None of that changes the fact that starting to charge for something that used to be free is going to be harder on the poorer people who use it than on the richer people; it's an argument that congestion pricing is still good policy despite that fact. (And a pretty good one; I favor congestion pricing, at least in NYC, myself.)

But it's worth paying attention to the fact that any policy initiative that, like congestion pricing, relies on pricing some good to reflect the externalities it causes (the primary example I'm thinking of is carbon taxes, but higher labor standards, animal welfare standards, and those sorts of things are all going to work out the same way) are all going to be harder on poorer people. That doesn't make that class of policies bad policies, but if inequality and social justice are things you worry about, it does mean that any time you advocate a policy relying on incorporating the costs of externalities in the price of a good, you immediately have to figure out how you're going to cope with the fact that it's going to affect poor people more painfully.

Sometimes, the answer is going to be a coldblooded "If you can't afford it, don't buy it". Animal welfare regulation should require that all livestock be treated humanely -- if the effect of that is to raise the price of meat to something ridiculously unaffordable, that doesn't bother me at all. A mostly vegetarian diet isn't a hardship, and if the real cost of meat prices it mostly out of reach for everyone but the wealthy, so be it. We don't worry that poor people can't afford all the caviar they want either.

Sometimes, the answer is "Make it up to them some other way". That's Yglesias's plan with congestion pricing -- to improve mass transit to the point that reducing one's driving to an affordable level isn't a hardship -- and it's a perfectly reasonable one. The roads are emptier, but people who now can't afford to drive much aren't worse off, because they have other options for getting around.

And sometimes the answer is going to be some sort of targeted subsidy so that poor people can afford as much of the relevant good as they need. Healthcare is the obvious example here -- if we decide that it's necessary to use market pricing to control healthcare usage, it's unjust to allow poor people to be priced out of the market. However healthcare is priced, we have to work out some method of making sure that everyone, even at the lowest income levels, can afford necessary healthcare.

Recognizing that policy solutions that depend on changing the price of a good to reflect its true cost are always going to be harder on the poor (to the extent that the good is used by poor people at all) doesn't mean they're bad solutions. But if you're going to advocate this sort of solution, you need an answer when someone says "But won't this hurt poor people?"

I've come around to thinking that Iggles is wrong when he says that Clinton doesn't have a realistic shot and should drop out. First, the logistics: if she's able to claim that she won Florida and Michigan (whatever their status), that she won the popular vote, and that she has momentum (especially if she wins PA), she can make a reasonable case to the superdelegates to back her. That's a long shot, but not impossible. I think the sticking point here is that most of us just really want her to go away and let us have our Obama nomination already, but if you look at it from the Clinton camp's point of view, there's a reasonable case to be made that she's certainly close enough to stay in, and--and this is the key--from their point of view, Obama is an empty-promising neophyte who won't be nearly as good a president as Hillary. To them, a Hillary victory isn't the crushing of hope for a generation of voters, but a narrowly averted disaster of misguided idealism.

So we're going to have this out on the merits, and telling her that she should drop out not only looks weak and whiny, but isn't really supported by the facts anymore.

The AP has what looks like a very thorough story on trace pharmaceuticals in drinking water and the short version is this: they're in yours.

Well, not yet. I plan to watch the finale tonight and will put up a post for spoiler-filled commentary.

Yglesias:

My main pursuit has been a remorseless quest to become the most famous member of the class of 2003, a mission in which I've been stymied at every turn by Miss Natalie Portman.

The New York Times, yesterday and today.

The only thing I remember from Poetics:

But again, tragedy is an imitation not only of a complete action, but of events inspiring fear or pity. Such an effect is best produced when the events come on us by surprise; and the effect is heightened when, at the same time, they follows as cause and effect. The tragic wonder will then be greater than if they happened of themselves or by accident; for even coincidences are most striking when they have an air of design. We may instance the statue of Mitys at Argos, which fell upon his murderer while he was a spectator at a festival, and killed him. Such events seem not to be due to mere chance. Plots, therefore, constructed on these principles are necessarily the best.