he said he could not remember the name of the producer. This morning

on MSNBC, he said, “I think her name was Mary Mapes.”

Mary Mapes has been a top producer for the evening news and 60 Minutes since 1989. She is Rather’s main producer.

Lockhart was White House deputy press secretary, and then secretary

under President Clinton.

If she did, I am not sure how Lockhart can pretend like he had never

heard of her before. How can the deputy press secretary, and then

press secretary, not know one of CBS News’ top producers? He acted as if he had never heard of her.

You’re welcome. Sorry about the double post.

RogerA,

Not to slide too deeply into the pit of pedantry but I’ve seen that 20-40 quote attributed to all sorts of people but never Bismarck before so I decided to do a little googling and sort it out. It appears to be originally due to Fran√ßois Guisot (1787-1874) in the form:

Not to be a Republican at 20 is proof of want of heart;

to be one at 30 is proof of want of head.

Here’s a good http://www.geocities.com/Athens/5952/unquote.html

He quotes from a book on this (must be true!), which says:

An orphan quote [unattributed quote in search of a home] sometimes

attributed to Georges Clemenceau is:

Any man who is not a socialist at age 20 has no heart.

Any man who is still a socialist at age 40 has no head.

The most likely reason is that Bennet Cerf once reported Clemenceau’s

response to a visitor’s alarm about his son being a communist:

If he had not become a Communist at 22, I would have disowned him.

If he is still a Communist at 30, I will do it then.

George Seldes later quoted Lloyd George as having said:

A young man who isn’t a socialist hasn’t got a heart;

an old man who is a socialist hasn’t got a head.

The earliest known version of this observation is attributed to

mid-nineteenth century historian and statesman François Guizot:

Not to be a republican at 20 is proof of want of heart;

to be one at 30 is proof of want of head.

Variations on this theme were later attributed to Disraeli, Shaw,

Churchill, and Bertrand Russell. (I misquoted Churchill to this

effect for years.)

Here are a couple of other good links:

http://www.msu.edu/user/vanhoose/quotes/0018.html

http://www.evangelicaloutpost.com/archives/000700.html

http://www.deanesmay.com/archives/001029.html

http://www.ranea.org/watts/archives/2003_08.html

The latter has a nice quote from Churchill which convinces me more than ever that I’m a “liberal” rather than a “leftist” (he says “socialist”)

Liberalism is not Socialism, and never will be. There is a great gulf fixed. It is not a gulf of method, it is a gulf of principle…. Socialism seeks to pull down wealth. Liberalism seeks to raise up poverty. Socialism would destroy private interests; Liberalism would preserve private interests in the only way in which they can be safely and justly preserved, namely by reconciling them with public right. Socialism would kill enterprise; Liberalism would rescue enterprise from the trammels of privilege and preference…. Socialism exalts the rule; Liberalism exalts the man. Socialism attacks capital; Liberalism attacks monopoly.

It shows in a nutshell what a deception the CBS story was — pretending the memos were authentic when once again Dan has admitted he had no proof of this whatsoever.

Thanks. I’ll check it out.

I’d also like to thank WichitaBoy for the eigenfaces link. Fascinating! I’d wondered how they did face recognition.

Charlie, while the number of DNA codons is limited, and therefore a codon either is or is not present, the expression of many sequences is under promoter control that is continuously variable. So I believe you’d need to think in terms of density functions, rather than delta functions, to link DNA to faces.

Re Occam’s point about the age factor, I always fall back on Bismarck’s aphorism about age and political philosophy: If you’re not a liberal when you are twenty you don’t have a heart; if you’re not a conservative when you’re forty, you don’t have a brain.

Charlie (c): I am assuming this is the kind of discussion that merits taking to your OT blog?

I wonder if the eigenfaces are similar?

The second thing is something I started wondering about back when I was a covert med student. DNA basically is a simple coding system with some error correction — there are about 20 “symbols” (codons) that are meaningful, out of a possible 64, and a gene is a small number of codon sequences. (Jamie, I know I’m simplifying this outrageously, but bear with me.)

Since the number of codons is small, the number of codons per gene is limited, and the number of genes is certainly limited, we can calculate a number of possible different configurations — and it’s actually pretty small. Comparatively.

I wonder if this kind of fine morphology could be mapped to specific gene sequences?

You could try Obsidian Wings. It’s a group blog that’s centrist to mild rather than wild left. Lot’s of the lefty commenters are “received wisdom” types working out of the Alinsky playbook but there aren’t many real foamers.

Good analysis. I’d wondered if there was an age bias built in – younger people tend to be both more left-wing, more intemperate, and more certain of their opinions than those of us of (ahem) a certain age.

That seems especially true of a DU, which reads like the transcript of a frat house political discussion conducted well into the second keg. Perhaps they should call it DU(I).

Still, there must be some adults (judged by an intellectual, not just chronological, criterion) on the left who do not reflexively compare Bush unfavorably with the Antichrist, but have a reasoned basis for their beliefs. Where are they?

That may well represent the most telling and concise summary of the significance of RatherGate to date.

I’ve also spent some time looking for such sites. I agree that it seems unlikely to be a simple searching problem.

I’m sure that sites like Roger’s are relatively rare. Maybe he does a superlative job of blocking out those who rant, but I think it’s more likely that a critical mass of reasonable people got here first; they have innoculated the site against puerile ravers. They and Roger set the tone, and people who want to drop a screed just don’t feel like this is the place to do it. That probably doesn’t happen too often.

On the other hand, it does seem to be easier to find a mildly right-leaning site than a mildly left-leaning site. I’ve often thought that the left is held together by being against some set of people rather than for some set of things, and that might provide a partial explanation for the absence of reasonable left-leaning blogs. If you are for the war in Iraq you need to think about costs and benefits, strategy and tactics, how it ties in with the War on Terror, and so on, but if you are against “Bushitler and Rove” you can easily fall into name-calling. So here at Roger’s place you get debates (friendly conversations, usually) about those things, but there you don’t have a debate. You all agree on one thing and one thing only – Bush and Rove (or all Republicans, or all conservatives, or all rich people) are evil. And maybe reasonable lefties don’t feel welcome there.

The most reasonable arguments I’ve seen from left-leaning posters have shown up here. Unfortunately, they all seem to have given up.