Kevin Drum talk term limits. He doesn't like em. I like em. But I dislike the hard cutoff of "two terms and your out!" I'd prefer something a little sexier.

So how about handicapping incumbents with an ever-increasing headwind:

votes = votes * log(50 - years_in_office) / log(50)

After 40 years, you only receive 60% of your raw vote total. Nobody will make it to 50 years.

Of course you can adjust those 50s to taste.

Plus, it will finally achieve what decades of school curricula have failed to do: link civics and algebra.

Benghazi was a lot like Whitewater, in that it never even made any sense. The Clintons are being accused of corruption so nefarious that they lost money on a land deal? What?

Of course Whitewater led to son of Whitewater, and third cousin 7 times removed from Whitewater, etc. Maybe that ultimately was the goal of the Benghazi Show.

The points of Benghazi!!!!™ include:

1. Rally The Base. Keep the rubes riled and donating.
2. Work The Refs. Keep the press distracted by the allegations so they won't be able to talk about anything the Dems might want to talk about.
3. Where There's Smoke There's FUD. Create Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt because as long as there are 'questions' and 'controversy' and someone says 'scandal' near 'Obama', a non-trivial number of people will assume there must be something to the allegations. That helps depress squishy Dem-leaning voters.
4. Digging In The Dirt. Having cover to launch a few Congressional investigations that could maybe turn up something real was a nice benefit, too. Never know where you might find another Lewinski. And they sound ominous even if they don't.

And since the press doesn't care about things that end with a whimper, the FUD will linger forever. 30 years from now, people will still believe all the GOP's lies and distortions.

The Dems might consider getting into this game sometime.

Ebola victims in one of the hardest-hit parts of Liberia have been treated by homeopaths who are determined to prove that arsenic, rattlesnake venom and the aphrodisiac Spanish Fly can cure Ebola.

The homeopaths arrived in Liberia to use the deadly outbreak to prove their controversial theories and have already spent two weeks in the country with patients in a hospital in Ganta, in the north of the country near to the epicentre of the outbreak.

...

Homeopaths claim that the way their remedies are prepared - which includes hitting the container 10 times against a leather and horsehair surface - give them a special potency and that the water molecules remember the presence of the active ingredient. Their opponents dismiss the 'treatments' as mumbo-jumbo and fear that desperately-ill Ebola patients will die as a result of their involvement.

Over the South China Sea.

An image that would've had my grandfather spitting mad, I'm sure.

Is there a name for the sub-style of country/rock where the songs are slow, with an electric guitar (usually with a lot of tremolo and reverb) playing sparse minor key leads and big minor chords that get whammied down at the end of verses? It usually got a bit of western feel to it. Everything on Neko Case's Blacklisted, for example.

Exhibit 1, Exhibit 2

When Tony Stark tries to lift Mjolnir using his Iron Man glove, he exerts a large upward force, greater than its weight, and yet the hammer remains at rest. So where does the additional downward force come from? One can only conclude that a unique property of uru metal is that, under the proper stimulus, it can emit large quantities of gravitons. On Earth, these fundamental particles have not been experimentally confirmed to exist, but as stipulated, the Asgardians are ahead of us scientifically. Gravitons are conjectured to transmit the gravitational force, and if an object emits additional gravitons, it is equivalent to increasing its mass. Thus, when an “unworthy” person applies an upward force, the uru metal increases the hammer’s weight to exactly cancel this lift, and the hammer remains unmoved.

If Mjolnir emits gravitons, could enough unworthy persons simultaneously attempting to lift it cause Mjolnir to start to attract objects via gravitation? And could sufficient force be applied that Mjolnir's gravity would be enough to capture light - turning Mjolnir into the center of a black hole?

If so, would Thor be able to lift Mjolnir without being destroyed by the tidal forces of all the attracted matter compressed around it?