The response to the capture of a US soldier by the Taliban in Afghanistan brings out the rank hypocrisy of the US failure to investigate its own war crimes.

Jared Polis seems to argue that we can’t have health care reform because the US tax system unfairly taxes S-Corporations at a higher rate than other corporations.

Scott Page is a professor of political science and economics at the University of Michigan, where he’s also the associate director of the Center for the Study of Complex Systems, and external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. (Disclosure: I worked for Scott when I was a post-doctoral fellow at the Center, and I’m also external faculty at SFI, so take my enthusiasm with salt to taste.) Scott’s written lots of academic papers, and co-written a textbook, but The Difference is, well, different. It’s a serious, but also playful, look at the power and virtues of diversity when it comes to solving difficult problems. It draws together many insights from many different academic disciplines, without requiring any special knowledge of its readers, just willingness to stretch their minds a little.

I’m going to assume that FreeRepublic founder Jim Robinson’s government disability check wasn’t in the mail again today which is why JimRob has just declared the recent election, as well as several of his pet peeve Constitutional Amendments, rescinded, overruled, repealed, nullified and voided…

A stopped clock is right twice a day, runs the old joke, you just have to keep looking at it. Fox News is running with a story about how the states hardest hit by the stimulus bill get the least money. They are right, but, as you would expect, they don’t tell you why, really, and they don’t exactly make sense in many of their measurements.

One of the most amusing genres of wingnut writing is the “it was unseasonably cool somewhere on the planet today, which proves that Al Gore’s a liar” post. Nate Silver had a funny take on this yesterday (also noted by Thers), in response to this Assrocket post. You see Silver, unlike Assrocket, actually bothered to look up the temperatures and it turns out that, surprise!, Assrocket was dead wrong about the weather in his own city. Oops.

Bank profits come from trading. How is that going to accomplish the Administration’s goal of getting bank lending restarted so we can get out of this financial mess?

On the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, Walter Cronkite would tell us the problem is not that everyone’s gone to the moon. The problem is that too many of us stayed home.

Randall Terry is at it again. Because apparently the half-skull poster of Sonia Sotomayor and exhortations to his unstable flock about the Angel of Death weren’t nearly enough to get him the fundraising haul attention he needed. In any polite society, his brand of dangerous stoking of the fires of hell would get him shunned by decent people. In fact, it’s well past time that GOP lawmakers were asked — clearly and without any ambiguity — what they think of Terry’s fire and brimstone violence stoking on behalf of their policy agenda.

The last House committee to pass the Tri-Committee health care bill out of its committee is the Energy and Commerce Committee. The reason why Rep. Waxman on that committee is having trouble passing health care reform is because of the Blue Dog Democrats. Of the three House committees working on health care reform bill, Energy and Commerce is the one that happens to have the most Blue Dog Democrats on it. So it’s them that’s blocking progress on the House side when it comes to health care reform.