Oliver R. Goodenough, The Rutland Herald Online, September 12, 2007 Economics professors have a standard game they use to demonstrate how apparently rational decisions can create a disastrous result. They call it a "dollar auction." The rules are simple. The professor offers a dollar for sale to the highest bidder, with only one wrinkle: the second-highest bidder has to pay up on their losing bid as well. Several students almost always get sucked in. The first bids a penny, looking to make 99 cents. The second bids 2 cents, the third 3 cents, and so on, each feeling they have a chance at something good on the cheap. The early stages are fun, and the bidders wonder what possessed the professor to be willing to lose some money. The problem surfaces when the bidders get up close to a dollar. After 99 cents the last vestige of profitability disappears, but the bidding continues between the two highest players. They now realize that they stand to lose no matter what, but that they can still buffer their losses by winning the dollar. They just have to outlast the other player. Following this strategy, the two hapless students usually run the bid up several dollars, turning the apparent shot at easy money into a ghastly battle of spiraling disaster. Theoretically, there is no stable outcome once the dynamic gets going. The only clear limit is the exhaustion of one of the player's total funds. In the classroom, the auction generally ends with the grudging decision of one player to "irrationally" accept the larger loss and get out of the terrible spiral. Economists call the dollar auction pattern an irrational escalation of commitment. We might also call it the war in Iraq. America is long past the possibility of some kind of profitable outcome in Iraq. Neo-con dreams of a quick, cheap victory, delivering democracy and peace and self-financed from Iraq's own oil revenue, got us started on this misadventure. Like the students, the early bidding seemed like a fun adventure to the boys in the Bush administration. "Bring 'em on," the chief boy said about the other bidders. And like the economics class, suddenly we were in the thing up to our necks, with only bad choices available at an ever-escalating cost. Read More Here

Sean Murphy, The Associated Press, September 12, 2007 OKLAHOMA CITY — To some Oklahoma football fans, there are things that just aren't done in the heart of Sooner Nation, and one of them is to walk into a bar wearing a Texas Longhorns T-shirt. That's exactly what touched off a bloody skirmish that left a Texas fan nearly castrated and an Oklahoma fan facing aggravated assault charges that could put him in prison for up to five years. The shocking case has set off a raging debate in this football-crazed region about the extreme passions behind a bitter rivalry. Some legal observers have even questioned whether this case could ever truly have an impartial jury. "I've actually heard callers on talk radio say that this guy deserved what he got for wearing a Texas T-shirt into a bar in the middle of Sooner country," said Irven Box, an attorney in this city 20 miles from Oklahoma's campus in Norman. According to police, 32-year-old Texas fan Brian Christopher Thomas walked into Henry Hudson's Pub on June 17 wearing a Longhorns T-shirt and quickly became the focus of football "trash talk" from another regular, 53-year-old Oklahoma fan Allen Michael Beckett. Thomas told police that when he decided to leave and went to the bar to pay his tab, Beckett grabbed him in the crotch, pulled him to the ground and wouldn't let go, even as bar patrons tried to break it up. When the two men were separated, Thomas looked down and realized the extent of his injuries. "He could see both of his testicles hanging on the outside of his body," said Thomas' attorney, Carl Hughes. "He was wearing a pair of white shorts, which made it that much worse." It took more than 60 stitches to close the wound, and police interviewed Thomas at a nearby hospital emergency room. Read More Here

Sort of what I thought Crocker looked and sounded like during the hearings.

A double shot of Chinaco to Bart.

New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper website nola.com has a big story, on Senator David Vitter's New Orleans prostitute called New Orleans prostitute tied to Vitter passes lie detector test: http://blog.nola.com/times-picayune/2007/09/new_orleans_prostitute_tied_to.html [Larry]Flynt paid for Ellis to fly to California to take the polygraph, which was administered by Edward Gelb, a past president of the American Polygraph Association... While Hoeffel [a Tulane Law School expert] said people fail lie detector tests for many reasons -- a certain word might trigger a response -- she said it is difficult for people to feign telling the truth. "Experts in the field generally agree that results where a person has passed are more reliable than where they say a person has failed," Hoeffel said. "You can fail a test for all kinds of innocent reasons, but to pass one is much harder. As it happens, many lawyers find them very persuasive." It's about the hypocrisy, folks. He drones on about the sanctity of marriage, then pays $300 an hour to cheat on his wife. He should resign and not show his face in public again.