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The bill that passed the Senate with such fanfare on Christmas Eve would impose a confiscatory 40 percent excise tax on so-called Cadillac health plans, which are popularly viewed as over-the-top plans held only by the very wealthy. In fact, it’s a tax that in a few years will hammer millions of middle-class policyholders, forcing them to scale back their access to medical care.

He meant that he wanted people to pray that 92-year-old Robert Byrd would become ill or die so he couldn't vote. Which is exactly what people did – calling in to right wing radio shows and proudly exclaiming it.

My bookend quotes capture how the "liberal" Beltway press corps changed the rules to cover Gore at the beginning of the decade and Obama at the end of it. And how did the same press corps spend the years between Gore and Obama? Lying down for Bush, of course. Having developed rabbit ears for the right-wing taunt of "liberal media bias," reporters, editors, producers, and pundits seemed determined during the Bush years to prove how un-liberal they really were. In the process, the press abandoned its traditional watchdog role and morphed instead into lapdogs.

How to make the Jayne Cobb hat.

Wow. Just wow.

For those who might not know what exactly we mean when we say a “Jayne hat”, here’s a bit of trivia for you. A “Jayne hat” is quite a cunning piece of knittery done by Ma Cobb herself and sent to her precious son Jayne Cobb in the Firefly episode “The Message”. (pictured right)

Aw crap. She was successful not just because she took a man's name, but also because she write like a sexist man who treated women badly. That blows.

chronic confabulation is often seen in patients with frontal lobe damage. Like SB, these people invent fantastical fictions about their lives, telling stories that make little literal sense. They lie about anything and everything, if only because the truth is too confusing. Such confabulations tells us something important about the mind: spontaneous creativity – the ability to make up a story on demand – is a fundamental feature of human cognition. We're all natural storytellers, weaving narratives out of the confusion. In other words, SB's brain damage didn't lead to some special new mental capacity, which the rest of us are missing. Instead, it released a latent creative capacity that we all have, if only we learned how to stop holding it back.

A great list that I need to study further and put into some format by which I actually buy some of these books.

A tool that determines your size for nearly every woman’s brand and retailer, from Abercrombie and Fitch to Zumiez.

"Taking a man’s name opened up a new world. It helped me earn double and triple the income of my true name, with the same work and service. No hassles. Higher acceptance. And gratifying respect for my talents and round-the-clock work ethic. Business opportunities fell into my lap. People asked for my advice, and they thanked me for it, too."

A blogger finds success after pulling a Bronte and publishing under a male pseudonym.

People don't stop doing something that is successful for them unless they have some incentive to change their behavior. They were successful at sucking so much money out of the system that the world economy nearly collapsed, and for the most part, they got away with it. So why would they change what they're doing now, without a really big stick to stop them?