Learning is fun! Here's your word for the day: Clock. I am sure the more clever of you out there can find some appropriate applications of this fine term. There are many, many Republicans who would appreciate it, I think.

While arguing with Dan Riehl over the use of the infamous "Democrat Party" slur, I was struggling to think of a group that finds itself in a similar situation. And then I realized it had been staring me in the face all along! So I created a handy resource for whenever you see that phrase pop up on the intertubes:

http://democratparty.blogspot.com/

As a thought experiment, let's say you lived next door to a Jewish day care center and you were bothered by it, not because you are anti-semitic, but because it's noisy and smells bad. Would you go around saying things like "I'm really getting sick of this Jew day care center"?

Furthermore, in your everyday parlance, do you frequently use terms like "that Jew lawyer" or "the Jew fraternity" or "a Jew holiday"?

Why or why not?

3quarks brings us the sad tale of another loss for the French. This time, it seems ils tout seul le font when it comes to search engines.

The war waged by French president Jacques Chirac against “Anglo-Saxon” cultural imperialism suffered a blow today when the Germans announced they were pulling out of a rival European search engine to Google.

Earlier this year Mr Chirac announced a series of ambitious technological projects designed to challenge the global dominance of the US. They included Quaero, a Franco-German search engine whose name is Latin for “I search”, but which was swiftly dubbed “Ask Chirac”.

Today German officials confirmed they were abandoning the €400m (£270m) project. Senior officials in Germany’s economics and technology ministry said they had decided to dump Quaero because they had been sceptical it would ever be able to challenge the might of Google and Yahoo!