[Quote]:

A man whose lies helped to make the case for invading Iraq – starting a nine-year war costing more than 100,000 lives and hundreds of billions of pounds – will come clean in his first British television interview tomorrow.

“Curveball”, the Iraqi defector who fabricated claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, smiles as he confirms how he made the whole thing up. It was a confidence trick that changed the course of history, with Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi’s lies used to justify the Iraq war.

He tries to defend his actions: “My main purpose was to topple the tyrant in Iraq because the longer this dictator remains in power, the more the Iraqi people will suffer from this regime’s oppression.”

Let’s offer him immunity in exchange for testimony at the International Court of Justice in The Hague against Bush and Cheney.

[Quote]:

A bill before the Colombian congress would decriminalize the cultivation of coca and marijuana in a bid to drive down raw drug prices and encourage peasant farmers to grow other crops. The bill is expected to be debated in the congress in coming days.

[..]

“Let’s see how well the laws of the market work,” said Velasquez, who represented the coca-growing province of Meta. “If there’s excessive production due to the lack of criminal penalties, surely the market will depress the price. We have to tell the United States and other consumers that Colombia has already paid enough, mostly in blood”, he added in remarks reported by the BBC. “It hasn’t worked. It’s time to change the strategy.”

[Quote]:

Gary Larson has a $5,000 deductible insurance plan, but has found that his medical bills are cheaper if he claims he’s uninsured and pays cash. Using that strategy, an MRI scan of his shoulder cost him $350. His brother-in-law went to a nearby clinic for an MRI scan of his shoulder, was billed $13,000, and had to come up with $2,500.

[..]

A single-payer system would address some of this nonsense, but forget it. Even President Obama’s watered-down healthcare reform act, which may well die on the Supreme Court’s operating table, couldn’t be passed if it came up for a vote now.

[..]

Schwarzman has an insurance plan with a high deductible ($7,000). Like Gary Larson (the guy at the top of this column), Schwarzman also paid about $350 for a scan on himself that would have cost much more if he went with his insurance company’s negotiated rate. A couple of years ago, his daughter needed an ultrasound for a possible gallstone. If he’d gone through his insurance company, he would have been charged $3,200, with insurance paying $1,500, leaving him a $1,700 bill. He chose instead to leave insurance out of the equation and pay cash instead. The price was $250.

“It’s outrageous,” Schwarzman said. “I don’t know where they’re coming up with these numbers. Are they picking them out of a hat?”

No, not a hat, I think…

[Quote]:

NBC has revealed that it is launching an internal investigation into the “editing process” surrounding the conversation between George Zimmerman and a police dispatcher (shortly before Trayvon Martin was shot), where Zimmerman appears to volunteer racial information.

Exposed by Fox News and Newsbusters, NBC played the conversation on the “Today Show” as: “This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black.”

The unabridged version is:

Zimmerman: This guy looks like he’s up to no good. Or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about.

Dispatcher: OK, and this guy — is he black, white or Hispanic?

Zimmerman: He looks black.

[Quote]:

Before Mitt Romney, those seeking the presidency operated under the laws of so-called classical politics, laws still followed by traditional campaigners like Newt Gingrich. Under these Newtonian principles, a candidate’s position on an issue tends to stay at rest until an outside force — the Tea Party, say, or a six-figure credit line at Tiffany — compels him to alter his stance, at a speed commensurate with the size of the force usually large and in inverse proportion to the depth of his beliefs invariably negligible. This alteration, framed as a positive by the candidate, then provokes an equal but opposite reaction among his rivals.

(…)

In much the same way that light is both a particle and a wave, Mitt Romney is both a moderate and a conservative, depending on the situation (Fig. 1). It is not that he is one or the other; it is not that he is one and then the other. He is both at the same time.

Totally funny and worth reading in its entirety.