There's no middle ground here. He's either a) clean or b) toast.

Spitzer either was or wasn't involved in siccing the State Police on a political rival, leaking false intimations about the State Police's findings and blaming the investigation on a non-existent press inquiry.

...But here's the thing: We only have Spitzer's word to go on here that he didn't know and wasn't involved.

What do we know about Eliot Spitzer?

We know that he has a history of threatening people with prosecution and ruination to get them to bow their head and scrape their knee to him.

We know that he's considered a control freak, a detail-oriented guy with a ceaseless attention to detail and the fine points of every case - and that this portrait of Spitzer is the one offered by his admiring supporters, not by his enemies.

If you trust what Spitzer's friends say about him, it would have been entirely out of character for Spitzer not to know what Communications Director Darren Dopp and others were doing in his name - especially considering that their target was the most powerful Republican in the state and that they were therefore playing a very dangerous high-stakes game.

In the fall of 1998, Eliot Spitzer was winning the race for attorney general. I was the Daily News Editorial Page editor, and my colleagues and I had pressed Spitzer about the source of millions of dollars he was spending on the race.

He told us, as he told election officials, that he had taken out personal bank loans. Days before the election, Spitzer confessed to another newspaper that his father really was the source of the money.

Soon after I got to my office that day, the phone rang. It was Spitzer, calling to explain. "Eliot," I said, "you lied to us."

His response was prompt and certain: "I had to," he said, adding his father didn't want his role known.

"I had to" is an excuse I will never forget. As Spitzer collected scalps on Wall Street and built a reputation as a crusading reformer, the memory tempered my applause. "I had to" wouldn't let go....

On Tuesday, the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute issued a report that suggested the Detroit automakers could earn $14.4 billion by 2017 by hiking efficiency to 35 miles per gallon by 2017 -- as required on a bill that passed the Senate. They stand to make more profit gains because they will be making improvements that have higher market value and higher profit margins, the study said.

Wow. What a huge turnaround that would be! So why didn’t these brain-iacs at University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute buy Chrysler? Maybe because it’s harder to actually do it than to put words on paper.

BOSTON -- Tamar Lewis runs a makeshift hair salon out of her one-bedroom apartment in Roxbury, a low-income neighborhood here. She's 24 years old and has been cutting hair since she dropped out of high school in 2002. Until recently, she never had health insurance.

...Earlier this month, she signed up for state-subsidized insurance under a new Massachusetts law that aspires to universal coverage. The plan costs her $80 a month.

...On the day Ms. Lewis signed up, she said she called more than two dozen primary-care doctors approved by her insurer looking for a checkup. All of them turned her away.

Her experience stands to be common among the 550,000 people whom Massachusetts hopes to rescue from the ranks of the uninsured. They will be seeking care in a state with a "critical shortage" of primary-care physicians, according to a study by the Massachusetts Medical Society released yesterday, which found that 49% of internists aren't accepting new patients. Boston's top three teaching hospitals say that 95% of their 270 doctors in general practice have halted enrollment.

Prior to the creation in 1913 of the national income tax, about a third of Uncle Sam's annual revenue came from liquor taxes. (The bulk of Uncle Sam's revenues came from customs duties.) Not so after 1913. Especially after the income tax surprised politicians during World War I with its incredible ability to rake in tax revenue, the importance of liquor taxation fell precipitously.

By 1920, the income tax supplied two-thirds of Uncle Sam's revenues and nine times more revenue than was then supplied by liquor taxes and customs duties combined. In research that I did with University of Michigan law professor Adam Pritchard, we found that bulging income-tax revenues made it possible for Congress finally to give in to the decades-old movement for alcohol prohibition.

Before the income tax, Congress effectively ignored such calls because to prohibit alcohol sales then would have hit Congress hard in the place it guards most zealously: its purse. But once a new and much more intoxicating source of revenue was discovered, the cost to politicians of pandering to the puritans and other anti-liquor lobbies dramatically fell.

Prohibition was launched.

Despite pleas throughout the 1920s by journalist H.L. Mencken and a tiny handful of other sensible people to end Prohibition, Congress gave no hint that it would repeal this folly. Prohibition appeared to be here to stay -- until income-tax revenues nose-dived in the early 1930s.

From 1930 to 1931, income-tax revenues fell by 15 percent.

In 1932 they fell another 37 percent; 1932 income-tax revenues were 46 percent lower than just two years earlier. And by 1933 they were fully 60 percent lower than in 1930.

With no end of the Depression in sight, Washington got anxious for a substitute source of revenue.

That source was liquor sales.

Update [7/25/2007]... Reader Andrei Porumbrica says:

I believe it might be too presumptuous to consider the Checkers solved. If I’m not mistaken, the solution announced in the Science was based entirely on the English version of droughts. I can think of at least two other versions [International (played on a 10×10 board) and Russian] that are probably much more sophisticated than the version tested. There is still hope.

...the United States that has fallen behind.

The numbers are startling. As recently as 2001, the percentage of the population with high-speed access in Japan and Germany was only half that in the United States. In France it was less than a quarter. By the end of 2006, however, all three countries had more broadband subscribers per 100 people than we did.

Even more striking is the fact that our “high speed” connections are painfully slow by other countries’ standards. According to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, French broadband connections are, on average, more than three times as fast as ours. Japanese connections are a dozen times faster. Oh, and access is much cheaper in both countries than it is here.

As a result, we’re lagging in new applications of the Internet that depend on high speed. France leads the world in the number of subscribers to Internet TV; the United States isn’t even in the top 10.

What happened to America’s Internet lead? Bad policy.

Exhibit A for the alarmists are statistics from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The OECD says the U.S. has dropped from 12th in the world in broadband subscribers per 100 residents to 15th.

The OECD's methodology is seriously flawed, however. According to an analysis by the Phoenix Center, if all OECD countries including the U.S. enjoyed 100% broadband penetration -- with all homes and businesses being connected -- our rank would fall to 20th. The U.S. would be deemed a relative failure because the OECD methodology measures broadband connections per capita, putting countries with larger household sizes at a statistical disadvantage.

The OECD also overlooks that the U.S. is the largest broadband market in the world, with over 65 million subscribers -- more than twice the number of America's closest competitor. We got there because of our superior household adoption rates. According to several recent surveys, the average percentage of U.S. households taking broadband is about 42%; the EU average is 23%.

Furthermore, the OECD does not weigh a country's geographic size relative to its population density, which matters because more consumers may live farther from the pipes. Only one country above the U.S. on the OECD list (Canada) stretches from one end of a continent to another like we do. Only one country above us on this list is at least 75% rural, like the U.S. In fact, 13 of the 14 countries that the OECD ranks higher are significantly smaller than the U.S.

And if we compare many of our states individually with some countries that are allegedly beating us in the broadband race, we are actually winning. Forty-three American states have a higher household broadband adoption rate than all but five EU countries. Even large rural western states such as Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and both Dakotas exhibit much stronger household broadband adoption rates than France or Britain. Even if we use the OECD's flawed methodology, New Jersey has a higher penetration rate than fourth-ranked Korea. Alaska is more broadband-saturated than France.

The OECD conclusions really unravel when we look at wireless services, especially Wi-Fi. One-third of the world's Wi-Fi hot spots are in the U.S., but Wi-Fi is not included in the OECD study unless it is used in a so-called "fixed wireless" setting. I can't recall ever seeing any fixed wireless users cemented into a coffee shop, airport or college campus. Most American Wi-Fi users do so with personal portable devices. It is difficult to determine how many wireless broadband users are online at any given moment, since they may not qualify as "subscribers" to anyone's service.

In short, the OECD data do not include all of the ways Americans can make high-speed connections to the Internet, therefore omitting millions of American broadband users. Europe, with its more regulatory approach, may actually end up being the laggard because of latent weaknesses in its broadband market. It lacks adequate competition among alternative broadband platforms to spur the faster speeds that consumers and an ever-expanding Internet will require.

Europe also suffers from a dearth of robust competition from cable modem and fiber. Cable penetration is only about 21% of households. In the U.S., cable is available to 94% of all households. Also, the U.S. is home to the world's fastest fiber-to-home market, with a 99% annual growth rate in subscribers compared with a relatively anemic 13% growth rate in Europe.

In fact, the European Competitive Telecommunications Association reported last fall that Europe is experiencing a significant slowdown in the annual growth rate of broadband subscriptions, falling to 14% from 23% annual growth. Growth stalled in a number of countries, including Denmark and Belgium (4% in each country). And France -- a relative star -- exhibited just 10% growth. Yet all of these nations are "ahead" of us on the much-talked-about OECD chart.

Here in the U.S., the country that is allegedly "falling behind," broadband adoption is accelerating. Government studies confirm that America's broadband growth rate has jumped from 32% per year to 52%. With new numbers expected shortly, we anticipate a continued positive trend. Criticisms of our definition of "broadband" being too lax are already irrelevant as over 50 million subscribers are in the 1.5 to 3.0 megabits-per-second "fast lane."

Something that many people secretly believed has been confirmed: You don't actually need a brain to work in a tax office. A French civil servant has been found to have a huge cavity filled with fluid in his head -- yet lives a completely normal life...

In fact the man, who works as a civil servant in southern France, has succeeded in living an entirely normal life despite a huge fluid-filled cavity taking up most of the space where his brain should be.

The Democrats are the party of slavery and were the party that started every war in the 20th century, except the other Bush debacle. The Federal Reserve, permanent federal income taxes, not one but two World Wars, Japanese concentration camps, and not one but two atom bombs dropped on the innocent citizens of Japan -- all brought to us via the Democrats.

Don't tell me the Democrats are our "saviors" because I am not buying it...

At least she opposes the Federal Reserve.

Lynda Johnson Robb...the wife of former Virginia governor and U.S. senator Charles Robb, drew appreciative laughs when she spoke of her mother's frugality. "She wanted to hold on until 2010, so we wouldn't have to pay any estate taxes," Robb said. "Oh, durn!"

Thanks to reader David Duval.

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