Free Republic

WASHINGTON, D.C.—This Lent, devout Catholic Joe Biden has announced that he is giving up coherent speaking for the next 40 days. It's traditional for Catholics to give up some mortal pleasure during the 40 days preceding Easter, and Biden is no exception to the custom. "Ffffor -- for the n-next, next 40,000 - excuse me - 40 hundred days, I will be giving up, you know, the thing," he said during his State of the Union address this evening. "The speaking of... of the -- the Eng, English wordle - begyerpardon - English word things, I'm giving all that up,...

SNIP While Biden offered coherence and demonstrated a facility of detail at the event, the central question of the election is whether Americans are looking for this kind of traditional presidential leadership. SNIP Then, he wrote this: Biden is far from a perfect candidate. The former vice president, who appears fit but has aged in recent years, sometimes interrupts himself, or loses his train of thought. And this: Biden came up with some misstatements of his own, for instance accusing Trump of holding the Bible upside down at his notorious photo-op outside a church opposite the White House. Then this:...

Physicists at the University of California, San Diego have for the first time observed the spontaneous production of coherence within "excitons," the bound pairs of electrons and holes that enable semiconductors to function as novel electronic devices. Scientists working in the emerging field of nanotechnology, which is finding commercial applications for ultra-small material objects, believe that this newly discovered property could eventually help the development of novel computing devices and provide them with new insights into the quirky quantum properties of matter. Details of the new finding appear in a paper published in the November 3 issue of the journal...

Why does the president call the secretary of state "Condi"? And what exactly is his philosophy? Thursday, July 27, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT Why does President Bush refer in public to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as "Condi"? Did Dwight Eisenhower call his Secretary of State "Johnny"? Did Jimmy Carter call his "Eddie," or Bill Clinton call his "Maddy," or Richard Nixon call his "Willie" or "Hank"? What are the implications of such informality? I know it is small, but in a way such things are never small. To me it seems a part of the rhetorical childishness of the...