Actually, HRC was, at worst, only the second-fiddle.

Obama is Commander-in-Chief.

Where was Obama and what was he doing? That's what I want to know.

When word of the Benghazi attack reached Washington, Obama was with SecDef Panetta in the White House, and they received the news together, but Obama provided no leadership. Panetta testified that Obama "left that up to us." Then Obama disappeared to shoot hoops, or get his nails done, or something, and he wasn't heard from again until it was all over.

The Commander-in-Chief was AWOL.

Here's a review I recently posted on a wine site: 2008 Baumard Savennieres, Chenin Blanc, Loire, France: This wine rewards careful attention. Initially one notices what is NOT there, more than what IS there. On the nose: No oak. The fruit is in the background, hardly perceptible at first. In fact, at first sniff about the only thing one notices is the clean-soapy-after-a-bath-smell. On the palate: Initially, only minerality, and a salinity that borders on downright saltiness, with precious little fruit. But spend a little time with this wine and then, on the nose, you will begin to detect lovely honey-and-orange blossoms, and on the palate, peach, melon, sour crabapple--all distinct and precise, but also all very subtle. This is wine worth paying attention to, but if you don't pay attention, you might miss it entirely. (Note: I am drinking and reviewing this wine in early 2013 when it is five years old, so it is almost certainly not the same "exhuberant" wine described in Wine Advocate. With age, it has become more restrained and subtle, more interesting.)

Evaluating a wine without food, which is the way it's always done for professional ratings, is like evaluating a basketball player based on what he can do on the court all by himself without any teammates and without the opposing team present. You might be able to tell whether he can shoot the ball, and whether he's fast, and whether he can jump, but you can't tell if he knows when to take a shot, and you can't tell whether he knows how to get in the position to rebound, and you can't tell whether he will pass the ball at the right time to the open man, and you can't tell whether he plays well with the rest of the team. Wine and food is a "team game."

Wine is a tricky thing.

Every bottle is different. A wine that is unimpressive by itself can be fantastic paired with the right food. (I rarely drink wine without food.)

Much depends on the circumstances--not just the food, but your mood, the people you're with, and all the other surroundings. The taste of a wine constantly changes in the glass, as its temperature changes and the wine is exposed to oxygen. Most wine will taste better after it has been in the glass for twenty minutes, when the flavors and odors begin to emerge as the wine warms and absorbs oxygen. You can't tell much about a wine with just one sip, especially if it is freshly poured.

Tasting blind, I can consistently distinguish btween plonk and a decent bottle. Plonk is generic, obvious, and "in your face." Better wines are usually more distinct, restrained, and subtle. (There's a lot of $30 plonk and a lot of good $15 bottles.) It's much harder for me to distinguish a decent bottle from a "really good" bottle, probably because I don't drink enough "really good" bottles to have sufficiently refined my palate.

Most people prefer plonk.

Don't trust these guys. This skit is designed to facilitate damage-control and diversion: "We confessed about IRS and AP, so we must be telling the truth about Benghazi."

Benghazi is the scandal in the White House.

Smaller heads will roll for the IRS and AP snooping. Admitting the latter two does Obama no real harm (although Eric Holder might fall) and allows Obama to regain credibility by pretending to be an indignant non-partisan-above it-all-truth-seeker.

Do you remember how well the Lewinsky scandal distracted from the Whitewater scandal? (If you can't remember, that proves my point even better.)

If Ricochet were a a navel, it would spend a lot of time talking about whether it's better to be lint-free or whether it should try to attract more lint.

@Duane Oyen re: alpha males and beta males. I think the alpha beta stuff misses the true variety and richness of the subject (not to mention the romance).

If Ricochet had a mood, it would be subjunctive.

Morally they weren't more egregious, but legally the difference was that the jury, following the law, did not find beyond reasonable doubt that those other babies were born alive or that Gosnell caused their deaths after they were out of the womb. Under the law, it's not murder for an abortionist to kill a baby not yet fully emerged from the womb.

I agree that women should be aware of the kind of men they attract--for the reasons you list, and also in case they are attracting mostly jerks, they might want to think about what messages they convey to the opposite sex.

On the other hand, as to your idea that generally "women want the men who want them," I've noticed a lot of single women won't give the time of day to perfectly nice and marriagable fellows who show an honest interest in them, and instead show their favors to predatory goofballs who feed them an obvious  line of fashionable bullcorn. (And, yes, some young men don't seem to understand how much can be won by a little sweet talk.)

I'm surprised.

I expected at least some jurors would be unwilling to find any doctor guilty of murder for a "post-birth abortion."

Horrendous as this case was to contemplate, perhaps this marks a turning point in how we think about abortion.

Maybe that result has less to do with differences in the minds of men and women, and more to do the with differences in the swimwear fashions of men and women. Put the average guy in a Speedo, and see how fast he can add a column of one-digit numbers! (Reminds me of the old joke: Why are men better at map-reading than women? Because men are more comfortable with the idea that "one inch equals one mile.")

Seriously, I'm beyond skeptical about any modern psychological study. Contemporary social sciences are a morass. Careful common-sense observation of everyday experience will find the correct answer more reliably.

More specifically, modern notions of "sexual objectification" are so politicized that they only hinder our understanding of healthy sexual attractiveness. It's a mistake to indulge arguments wherein social science "studies" are accepted as most authoritative. Better to read Jane Austen.

I'm sure WaPo will do its own reporting on it. But first they gotta figure out how to spin it. (This one seems easy: "In Wake of Mothers Day Shootings, Louisiana Conservatives Stubbornly Resist Laws to Limit Gun Violence.")

Hadn't you heard?!?! The prize was permanently retired the day my representative, the inestimable Sheila Jackson-Lee, entered congress.

If we're arguing seriuosly about Coed Jello Wrestling at our (once) great universities, maybe it's time to chuck the entire obsolete pretense of Liberal Education. Just grant MFA degrees in Porcine Mud Art and be done with it. As Western Civilization slithers down the sewer pipe, the main lesson to be learned is, "Have fun and always wear a condom, because you never know what's in the Jello."

Now how did I get that double post?