"Twitter was forced to admit it breached the trust of its users when it apologized for suspending the account of Guy Adams..."

"...  a Los Angeles correspondent for the U.K.'s Independent newspaper."

100 years ago today: "Arthur Eldred, a 17-year-old Boy Scout from Long Island, became the first person to earn the Eagle Scout rank."

"Eldred's initial accomplishment was to complete the requirements for the rank of Eagle Scout only six months after that supreme award in American scouting was announced in April 1912." 

The leaders of the Boy Scouts of America (BSA), assuming it would take several years for any boy to earn the required 21 merit badges, hadn't yet devised a final review system for Eagle candidates; they hadn't even settled on a design for the medal....

Out of the more than 115 million boys who have passed through the Boy Scouts of America in the last 102 years, approximately two million have become Eagle Scouts, a 2% rate that has climbed to about 4% of all scouts in recent years....

Many went on to notable careers and distinguished service to the country. The list of famous Eagles over the last century includes movie and television stars, six Medal of Honor recipients, Nobel Prize winners, novelists, a number of astronauts (including most Shuttle astronauts), Tuskegee airmen and Japanese-American internees, congressmen, senators and governors, an endless number of corporate CEOs and university presidents, a U.S. president (Gerald Ford), and the first man to walk on the moon (Neil Armstrong). But there are other, perhaps less obvious, Eagles as well: sexologist Alfred Kinsley, Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard and Washington's disgraced ex-mayor Marion Barry....

"Culture Does Matter," writes Mitt Romney.

In National Review, pushing back efforts to make it seem racist to say that nations prosper when their culture has certain qualities that Israel has and the Palestinians lack.

But what exactly accounts for prosperity if not culture? In the case of the United States, it is a particular kind of culture that has made us the greatest economic power in the history of the earth. Many significant features come to mind: our work ethic, our appreciation for education, our willingness to take risks, our commitment to honor and oath, our family orientation, our devotion to a purpose greater than ourselves, our patriotism. But one feature of our culture that propels the American economy stands out above all others: freedom. The American economy is fueled by freedom. Free people and their free enterprises are what drive our economic vitality.

But what exactly accounts for prosperity if not culture? is a clever question that provides leverage for arguing — not that he argues it — that if you don't think it's culture, you must think it's some inborn biological factor. That is: If you don't agree that it's culture, you could be a racist.

(And yes, I realize that inference will be resisted with the argument that the economically unsuccessful places are oppressed by other countries, Israel is oppressing the Palestinians, etc. etc.)

ADDED: This is related, from Stephen Moore's tribute to Milton Friedman (who was born 100 years ago yesterday):

Once in the early 1960s, Friedman wrote the then-U.S. ambassador to New Delhi, John Kenneth Galbraith, that he would be lecturing in India. By all means come, the witty but often wrong Galbraith replied: "I can think of nowhere your free-market ideas can do less harm than in India." As fate would have it, India did begin to embrace Friedmanism in the 1990s, and the economy began to soar. China finally caught on too.

Over 3,000 comments on WaPo's blogpo "Harry Reid: Mitt Romney didn’t pay taxes for 10 years."

It's gotten this bad, the shameless, idiotic, desperate efforts to push Obama: passing along something Harry Reid said "a person who had invested with Bain Capital" said. Well, HuffPo had already published it. It's a fact that it's a rumor. Just reporting the existence of a rumor, maybe. Pathetic!

Here's one of the highest rated comments:

It may appear that Reid's claim that Romney paid no taxes for ten years is extreme and poorly sourced -- however, if Mitt thinks his comment is unfair, all he has to do to make Reid appear a liar and a fool is to release his own tax returns, which is totally within his power. 

While not having paid ANY taxes for TEN years is a sufficient cause for Mitt to not release them, it is not a necessary cause. There could be many other things he wishes to hide, from offshore tax shelters, to very low tax rates, to connections to Bain Capital actions he wishes to hide from. There is only one thing certain about Romney's tax returns: HE KNOWS that there is SOMETHING in them which is disqualifying, that there is something that dare not face the light of day.

That's the narrative. All you have to do is to track people into thinking like that, and Harry Reid knows it.

Ted Cruz — a big Tea Party victory and the GOP will have another Hispanic Senator.

He wasn't what the party insiders wanted. (He crushed their guy, David Dewhurst, 55% to 45%.)

[Matt Kibbe, president of FreedomWorks, a Washington-based group that helps finance conservative anti-establishment candidates] said Cruz’s win is the biggest this year for tea party activists, calling it “an 11 and Indiana a 10” on the scale of importance. The reason, according to Kibbe and other tea party leaders, is because of the sheer size of Texas.

In the 2010 primaries, the movement fared best in smaller states without large media markets — places such as Delaware, where neophyte Christine O’Donnell used grass-roots support to sweep past a 30-year veteran of state GOP politics. Just 50,000 people voted in that primary. The tea party’s feat was repeated in other small-turnout states, such as Nevada and Alaska.

This year, tea party leaders sought mostly pure conservatives but also candidates with more political and professional experience, aiming to appeal to activists as well as independents in the general election. “You’re not going to see any Christine O’Donnell train wrecks,” Kibbe predicted, noting O’Donnell’s defeat by nearly 20 points in that fall’s election.

Cruz epitomized that effort. Unlike some of the anti-intellectual candidates of the tea party past, he boasted of his undergraduate degree from Princeton University, his national debating championship, his Harvard law degree and his Supreme Court clerkship.

“I think he’s got the pedigree, he’s got all of it,” [Rand] Paul said. “In fact, we’ve joked that he’s too smart for the Senate to fit in.”

So now the Tea Party has it: A really big state and a really big brain. And Hispanic!

ADDED: I think we'll see a lot more of the effort to distinguish Cubans from other Hispanics. That has already come up in the context of Marco Rubio.

"Eight female badminton players tossed out of Olympics for trying to lose matches, Badminton World Federation announces."

Email from CNN.

Earlier story here.

IN THE COMMENTS: LoafingOaf asks:

If they have the tournament set up so that it's to a team's advantage to lose a match, what did they expect? 

Answer: more subtlety.

ADDED: "... Sections 4.5 and 4.16 of the Badminton World Federation players' code... stipulate that a player employ 'one's best efforts to win a match' and bans 'conducting oneself in a manner that is clearly abusive or detrimental to the sport.'"

Most paid spectators at Tuesday's badminton women's doubles matches played Potter Stewart, knowing "detrimental" when they saw "detrimental" — as four pairs of players clearly tried to throw matches in order to influence their draws in the tournament's quarterfinals....

"I'm sorry, it's blindly obvious what's going on. It's as if neither player wants to win the match. There's a simple answer: Tell both players, if you don't play properly, you're both thrown out of the tournament," intoned the BBC's announcer at Wembley Arena....

But it is sport. Manipulating the seeding or draws in tournaments has a long tradition in sport...

If the Olympic badminton players could be faulted for anything, it's for not throwing their matches better.

Sending endless serves out of bounds and hitting returns into the net — that's no way to tank. Points must be played above-board, until the critical moment when a shot goes awry. The players should have strained and gasped, and inspected their racquets for holes after misplays.

As I said: more subtlety.

"Because there is no cosmic point to the life that each of us perceives on this distant bit of dust at galaxy's edge..."

"... all the more reason for us to maintain in proper balance what we have here. Because there is nothing else. No thing. This is it. And quite enough, all in all."

Wrote Gore Vidal, who reached the end of his enough yesterday. He was 86.

Here's a late interview (with al Jazeera), where he makes himself cry — at 2:23 — saying, about Americans — "They're the greatest nation in the world in the world." And then "Everybody says that, that's why they keep shooting us.... That's jealousy." And then recovers and says "This is irony, you know."



ADDED: Here he is calling William F. Buckley a "crypto Nazi"... and also:

Consider his "incorrigible" mother, a sometime actress who "failed a Paramount screen test because of the prominence of her manly mustache." Did you know that Eleanor Roosevelt had a mad Sapphic crush on Amelia Earhart and was "constantly proposing" that they fly around the country, "with Amelia at the controls"?....

Asked to define commercialism, Vidal remarks, "It's the ability to do well what ought not to be done at all." Bobby Kennedy had "aggressive non-charm." The '60s: "a decade stolen from those of us who were living in it." And he doesn't turn away from the wit of others. Like Tennessee Williams, who stares at Jack Kennedy and mutters, "That boy has a nice ass."

What's the story with Amelia Earhart? Vidal's Wikipedia page says: "according to biographer Susan Butler, was the great love of Amelia Earhart's life."