"Traveling Eternity Road, What Will You Find There?"

First let me say that tracking the game yesterday at the MLB site is weird.  I'm not watching on Fux and I'm not a subscriber to MLB.tv, so I followed along on their graphic representation of the game, which was ...

(I got into baseball as a child--I have told that story before--through listening to it on the radio.  There are certain disadvantages to that method, one of which is that I don't know what a split-finger four-seam lightly tongued fastball looks like.  Although Bugs Bunny was sort of a tutorial.)

... silent.

On the radio and TV, the audience gets both the play-by-play and incidental chatter meant to fill the silences and gaps between action impart the lore of this storied game.  In the graphic representation, none of that happens.  Totally mit out sound.  There's an image of a batter in the batter's box (right or left, with the uniforms facing the correct way) against a backdrop of stadium.  The strike zone is indicated by a rectangle divided into 9 parts approximating the width of home plate and the length between knees and midchest.  Trajectory of incoming balls (there must be a device recording this stuff behind home plate) is shown graphically.

And that's it.  There's other information--batting order, strikes and balls, strikeouts, walks, doubles, scoring, the usual statistics.  But silent.

I have to check that out again this evening.

Oh, and Cleveland won the first game.  6-0.

---

And now for sewer-side:

• Meta family structure and political/moral value beliefs.  Doug Muder, from 2005, and still prescient.
• Echidne of the Snakes warns of the threat of the alt-right.
• Zandar Versus The Stupid on a deliberately-engineered glitch in Obamacare.  (The Republican governors' non-expansion of Medicaid, that is, not the fact that healthy people aren't getting health insurance as much as unhealthy people are.)

  Republican governors refusing to take money set aside to soften the blow for consumers through expanded Medicaid and health insurance companies bailing out of the single-plan market have largely succeeded in damaging the system in enough states to put the burden on shifting costs to premiums[...]

• Two-fer:
  
  • Yastreblyansky:

    That's really about it. I can't understand why he skips the obvious solution, which is monarchy. If you have a king then he can appoint all 30 or 40 of the nation's true conservatives to run the legal and governmental and cultural and intellectual establishments and the lack of votes isn't a problem, which completely eliminates the other problem, of meritocracy, in which liberals keep winning out just because they do better in their exams. Monarchy, and a judicious use of prison torture and capital punishment. And it's very alt-right, which is so fashionable just now.

  • Driftglass:

    Today was the day it began to dawn on H. Pecksniff Rosencrantz "Ross" Douthat III that he and every other card-carrying member of the professional Conservative Brain Caste really really suck at their job:
    
    [...]
    
    What Mr. Douthat is trying gently suggest is that if Dubya hadn't lied American into the wrong war and hadn't fucked that war up something something New American Century!
    
    What Mr. Douthat is desperately trying not to say is "Holy shit, the Left really was right about us smug little assholes all along!"
    
    [...]
    
    For the record, it has taken less than the gestation period of the average porcupine for Donald J. Trump (and that vengeful bitch Karma) to force both of the New York Times' highly-paid professional Conservative Public Intellectuals into clenched-teeth admissions that they have have never really had the slightest fucking clue as to what was going on inside the Conservative movement, the Republican party or America in general[.]

    (See the post for the Douthat quotes, or go to the New York Times [linked in post] to get the full experience.)
    
  • ETA:  Now three-fer:  Susan of Texas (Hunting of the Snark):

    The purpose of academia is to gain knowledge and pass it on to our young. Bureaucracies exist to run the business of governing, the entertainment industry exists to make money, and the legal establishment exists to create, maintain, and enforce a code of law. None of these organizations owe conservatives a living. If these organizations are meritocracies, moreover, then the cream will rise and the dregs will fall. The same conservative philosophies that glorify individual achievement and success through hard work and discipline should make whining for more power, money, and jobs a humiliating task. Sadly, however, Douthat is forced to admit that competence has a liberal bias.
    
    Since, as Douthat admits, the conservative elite don't have enough brain or artistic power to succeed in lucrative and/or prestigious profession[s], they must depend on their base's power to get jobs. But once again, an impediment stands in their way. After yanking around, lying to, and ignoring their followers, the followers no longer trust their elite.

    (Ahem. It's called "reaping what one sows."  A conservative value.)
• The ballot ( I vote absentee; there's usually a 50-50 chance I won't be here in November) for federal, state, and county offices and various propositions is four pages long, and the pages are approximately 11 x 17.
• Conspiracy satire, from Paul Bibeau.

  It makes the Trumpkins crazy. The worst thing for a conspiracy theorist is to discover an actual fact. They go insane over it. It's like chumming the water around a few dozen tiger sharks. You give them a little bit of detail, and what happens? They're out there on Twitter and Facebook trying to convince their friends and family that every time John Podesta had a conference call it was so he could help the Fed put tracking chips in your Lucky Charms. They sound angry and unhinged, and the fact that their niece with the big H on her profile doesn't care makes them even more angry and unhinged. Nothing sells a seventh Clinton term like Trumpkins frothing and ripping their hair out.

• Pernicious is the word; more on voter suppression with loud cries over non-existent fraud.  (Zandar Versus The Stupid)
• Bringing the day the Hollywood Walk of Fame is enclosed to a depth of 4 inches of plastic and requires airline-travel levels of security to visit closer:  Vandal destroys Trump's Walk of Fame star.  More details from Oliver Willis.

• And as we all know perfectly well, The Gingrich Rules can only be destroyed in the fires of Mount Doom where they were forged.

  Driftglass. Because...
  

Speaking of Deplorable

• Imani Gandy (Angry Black Lady Chronicles at Rewired), via Shakesville:  North Carolina Republicans still trying to prevent black people from voting.

  Even so, Republicans have evidently decided to bring the fight to the local level, taking advantage of the remaining provisions of the law.
  
  In an email sent to GOP members of county elections boards last month, North Carolina Republican Party Executive Director Dallas Woodhouse urged them to “make party line changes to early voting,” ones that are “supported by Republicans.” This included cutting early voting hours and refraining from putting polling sites on college campuses.

  You'd think that Republicans believe that African Americans should logically vote for creepy racists. I don't think Republicans understand how logic works.
  
• I begin to suspect I do not share the values of the "Values" Voter Summit, not if this is the sort of thing they encourage.  (Karoli Kuns, Crooks and Liars)
• Persecution complex.  (Professor Chaos, The Daily Irritant)

  American Christians are totally persecuted every day, fed to the lions, burned at the stake, the whole bit. That's why the catacombs are full every Sunday.

• Alexandra Rosenmann (AlterNet) presents a video in which Thom Hartmann takes down the Libertarian Party.
• Ta-Nehisi Coates has two more essays:
  1. On O. J. Simpson, the trial, his history, and its relevance to what's happening now;

     The claim was prophetic. Four years after Simpson was acquitted, an elite antigang unit of the LAPD’s Rampart division was implicated in a campaign of terror that ranged from torture and planting evidence to drug theft and bank robbery—“the worst corruption scandal in LAPD history,” according to the Los Angeles Times. The city was forced to vacate more than 100 convictions and pay out $78 million in settlements.
     
     The Simpson jury, as it turned out, understood the LAPD all too well. And its conclusions about the department’s inept handling of evidence were confirmed not long after the trial, when the city’s crime lab was overhauled. “If your mission is to sweep the streets of bad people … and you can’t prosecute them successfully because you’re incompetent,” Mike Williamson, a retired LAPD officer, remarked years later about the trial, “you’ve defeated your primary mission.”

     And it's nice, long, and thorough.
  2. On the Breitbartification (ptui!) of the media.

     The media’s criticism of Clinton’s claim has been matched in vehemence only by their allergy to exploring it. “Candidates should not be sociologists,” glibly asserted David Brooks on Meet The Press. I’m not sure why not, but certainly journalists who broadcast their opinions to the nation should have to evince something more than a superficial curiosity. It is easy enough to look into Clinton’s claim and verify it or falsify it. The numbers are all around us. And the story need not end there. A curious journalist might ask what those numbers mean, or even push further, and ask what it means that the ranks of the Democratic Party are not totally free of their own deplorables.
     
     Instead what followed was not journalism but, as Jamelle Bouie accurately dubbed it, “theater criticism.” Fournier and Blake’s revulsion at the thought that some 20 percent of the country, in some fashion, fit into that basket is illustrative. Neither made any apparent attempt to investigate the claim. No polling data appears in either piece and no reasons are given for why the estimate is untrue. It simply can’t be true—even if the data says that it actually is.

• Jim Wright's essay on 9/11, which was deleted and then restored to Facebook.  Another good reason not to have a Facebook account.
• The Talking Dog's essay on 9/11, with uncomfortable after-effects.
• Trying to power through illness just makes one sicker.

  Dick Cheney had serious heart problems and nobody seemed to care, never mind that Clinton has been held to a higher standard of proving she's "as strong as a man" in every political aspect.
  
  But Trump supporters are cackling to themselves that Clinton leaving Sunday's 9/11 memorial service in NYC to recover in daughter Chelsea's apartment is the end of the race and her political career, as it's proof of everything from cancer to Parkinson's disease to stroke.
  
  The press seems to think "there's something there." Or, they want there to be. After all, they have to keep the race close to sell ads.
  
  Meanwhile, Trump, older and in worse physical shape than Hillary, has been really, really quiet on this so far...
  
  How odd.

• ETA: Chauncey DeVega:

  By some estimates, the American media has given Trump at least $3 billion worth of free coverage. The 24/7 cable news cycle and the media’s corporate culture have fueled an obsession with creating a “horse race” and a willingness to massage, distort and misrepresent events in order to sustain that narrative. For example, the media continues to manufacture “scandals” about Clinton’s emails while ignoring or underplaying Trump’s misdeeds, from the buying of political influence and various documented acts of political corruption to his encouragement of election tampering by a foreign power, his questionable business practices and other instances of unethical behavior.

• Avedon has lots of links with astute commentary today, so I'm sending you there.

More Dangers

Dave Neiwert asks a question.

All of this stands in stark contrast to media and public response to the single greatest threat to the lives and well-being of police officers in the United States over the past decade and longer: the sovereign citizens movement.

[...] In the succeeding years, it has not gone away – and indeed has been picking up strength in the past decade, particularly fueled by right-wing reaction to the election of Barack Obama as president in 2008.

In the eight years since, sovereign citizens have killed nine police officers and injured more than a dozen others in 16 separate incidents, many of them violent responses to ordinary police actions such as issuing traffic tickets or serving warrants. Other incidents involved plots to kidnap, torture and murder police officers, or armed standoffs in which law-enforcement officers were threatened.

And yet...

Nah, that leads nowhere.  Better just eat the ice cream.

Haystacks, Calhoun

There is no theme.  There are only links.  Tabs have to be closed.  It's all the wrong Ring cycle.

• Robert Reich (AlterNet) advises Ms. Clinton and Mr. Sanders to kiss and make up face some hard realities about their respective campaigns.
• Karoli Kuns (Crooks and Liars) on the Benghazi time-wasting probes and Trey Gowdy.
• Is America sliding into fascism?  (Robert Kagan, Washington Post)

  This phenomenon has arisen in other democratic and quasi-democratic countries over the past century, and it has generally been called “fascism.” Fascist movements, too, had no coherent ideology, no clear set of prescriptions for what ailed society. “National socialism” was a bundle of contradictions, united chiefly by what, and who, it opposed; fascism in Italy was anti-liberal, anti-democratic, anti-Marxist, anti-capitalist and anti-clerical. Successful fascism was not about policies but about the strongman, the leader (Il Duce, Der Führer), in whom could be entrusted the fate of the nation. Whatever the problem, he could fix it. Whatever the threat, internal or external, he could vanquish it, and it was unnecessary for him to explain how. Today, there is Putinism, which also has nothing to do with belief or policy but is about the tough man who single-handedly defends his people against all threats, foreign and domestic.
  
  To understand how such movements take over a democracy, one only has to watch the Republican Party today.
  
  [...]
  
  What these people do not or will not see is that, once in power, Trump will owe them and their party nothing. He will have ridden to power despite the party, catapulted into the White House by a mass following devoted only to him.

  Read the whole thing. Really.  Although you may want to read this post by Yastreblyansky afterward.
  
• A little lawsuit in Wisconsin.  (capper, Crooks and Liars)
• The self-stinging scorpion strikes again.  (Karoli Kuns, Crooks and Liars) (Southern Beale is also on the case.)
• Steve M. (No More Mr. Nice Blog, although I first saw the article at Crooks and Liars) on John ("Torture Fan") Yoo's approval of Donald Trump's Supreme Court possibilities.  (Warning:  Not for anyone with a working imagination.)
• Anti-biotic resistant bacteria are here.  Well, in the United States.

  Even more alarming, the MCR-1 gene can transfer resistance to other bacterium through small bits of DNA called plasmids, meaning the gene can pass between species of bacterium as opposed to remaining contained to one species.
  
  “The fear is that this could spread to other bacteria and create the bacterium that would be resistant to everything,” Dr. Beth Bell, director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, told ABC News.

  (Elizabeth Preza, AlterNet)
• Taking on Megan McArdle's state of denial, in this corner, Susan of Texas (The Hunting of the Snark).
• Pruning Shears:

  The right wing commentariat has responded to all of this by literally ignoring it. [...] He’s unelectable, they say. Boorish, immodest, not a conservative, doesn’t support traditionally conservative principals, and so on. All true, but irrelevant. They’re basically saying they’re mad at the voters, which, who cares? Work that out with your therapist, not your audience.
  
  What’s relevant is what they literally cannot bring themselves to look at how a Republican party that prioritizes their ideals could nominate Donald Trump. I understand why they can’t bear to grapple with it, because the answer is a very unhappy one for them: The party, as represented by its base, does not actually prioritize any of those things. Perhaps it hasn’t for a long time; Donald Trump is just the first to test the hypothesis.

"Willkomen, Bienvenue, Welcome..."

Because It NEEDS Repeating

• TORTURE IS MORALLY AND ETHICALLY WRONG.
• TORTURE DOESN'T "WORK."
• TORTURE IS NOT A CHRISTIAN VALUE.  (No, the Inquisition and witch hunts don't count for this.)

Yes, I am considering the source.  (Crooks & Liars.  Warning:  video clip.)  Pecunium, who is way more articulate about this than I am and has taught interrogation techniques, has a posting here in which he says:

One of the principle part of SERE school, where pilots and aircrew are trained in what it’s like to be tortured, is that everyone breaks. Everyone. Even when it’s known that the tortures are part of the drill, and one won’t be maimed, much less killed, they all break. So why do our politicians, and pundits, pretend that “bad guys” are different?

Because it sells. [...]

[...]

Fear sells. Torture advocates (you can’t call them apologists when they use the word, and say we need to do the deeds) are selling fear, and fear is like yeast, once you put it in the dough, it won’t stop so long as it is fed.

Mr. Trump might consider jokes about his hands grounds for torture. Really, you don't want that.

In slightly more encouraging news, Radovan Karadzic has been convicted of war crimes and sentenced to 40 years.

Before the Blues

• Yes, three days in a row.  So exhausting.
• Via Just an Earth-Bound Misfit, I and AlterNet:  "Psychologists' Collusion With US Torture Limited Our Ability To Decry It Anywhere" related to "US torture doctors could face charges after report alleges post-9/11 'collusion.,'" both from The Guardian for obvious reasons.  (Links to older references to articles on torture here.  Along with occasional statements of opinion.)  Humans do much rationalizing, some of it twisty, in the service of evil; oath-breaking tends to be frowned upon, but oath-worming-out-of is the mark of intelligence (spit).
  
  Torture is still immoral. And wrong. And evil.
• The Pope's a Christian!  Who'd have thought?

Still Evil

• Slavery in South Korea:  disabled workers harvesting sea salt.
• The movie version should be interesting:  Chinese double agent and political party fundraiser and donor.  Via Mercury Rising, 
• At Friends of Justice, via The Slacktivist, a Christian's response to the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on torture.

  More troubling is the substitution of a “conservative” position for a Christian position. American evangelicals, by and large, are conservatives first and Christians second. They forget that their Savior was born in a manger who became an illegal alien in Egypt in order to flee the legal violence of Empire. Finally, our Lord was tortured mercilessly by the Imperial guard before being nailed to a Roman cross.
  
  If you don’t see Jesus on the water boarding table; if you don’t get that it’s Jesus standing for hours in a dark room on a broken leg; if you don’t realize that it’s Jesus dying of hypothermia on a cold, urine-soaked floor, and if you don’t understand the ultimate target of the anal probe, you don’t grasp what happened on Good Friday and, just as significantly, you haven’t reckoned with our complicity in the extra judicial crucifixions outlined in the Senate Committee’s report.

  See, I've been muttering for a while now that people who identify as Christian should be identifying with Christ in that narrative; a lot of Americans seem to be identifying with the Roman soldiers.

Just So You Know

I may not have been clear in my scribblings over the last six or so years.  It's possible.  There's a school of thought that says if any misinterpretation of writing is possible, that is the misinterpretation that will be seized upon.  Unearthing examples will be left to the reader.

So.

Let me be blunt:

Torture is wrong.  Torture is unethical and immoral.  Torture is counterproductive.  Torture is evil.

Are we clear on that?  If not, the Internet is huge.

Commentary on the Feinstein report.  (James Wimberly, The Reality-Based Community.)

Wider implications.  (Pecunium, Better Than Salt Money, who has been writing about interrogation from the point of an interrogator for a long time now.)

Roundup of "conservative," "right-wing," and "Republican" responses to the report.  You may notice a certain bent to their reactions.  (Terrance, Republic of T) Additional video for the strong of stomach.  (Three of these videos come with Mature Content warning screens.  Take that seriously.)

Because They Know They are Doing Evil in the Sight of God

Why it's rare to hear apologies for torture.

Excerpt:

In the second half of the 20th Century, Britain's security forces developed what they called the "five techniques": hooding, white noise, a diet of bread and water, sleep deprivation, and being forced to stand in a stress position against a wall for long periods.

We now know that British agents trained officers of Brazil's military dictatorship in these techniques.

The report of Brazil's Truth Commission into the excesses of the dictatorship - published on the same day as the US Senate Intelligence committee's report into the CIA's "detention and interrogation program" - quoted former Brazilian President Ernesto Geisel saying that officers learned from the British secret service. They "practised torture with discretion", he said, while Brazil's "inexperienced staff did it in a more extrovert and open manner".

The British government, like the US until the Obama presidency, has always denied that its techniques, which were still being used in the Northern Ireland conflict in 1971, constituted torture. The European Court of Human Rights also ruled in 1978 that they constituted "inhuman and degrading treatment" rather than torture, though it will soon be asked to reconsider.

Regardless of the label, the brutality of these techniques was widely condemned when details were revealed. The UK's international reputation was tarnished and it lost a good deal of moral authority in its fight against terrorism. [Added emphasis mine.]

ETA: See also Jon Carroll's column. And don't buy into fear.

Veterans/Armistice Day

War is an intelligence test, and we keep flunking.

Other people saying more eloquent things:

• Group News Blog (Evan Robinson):

  At least be conscious that there are nearly 20 million Americans who signed up to go into harms way for the rest of us. Try to be worthy of that.

• filkerdave:

  On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, the guns fell silent.
  
  Thank you to all who served.

  Note the first comment.
  
• Vagabond Scholar (Batocchio) has a Walt Kelly quote and a list of links.
  
• Rolling Around In My Head (Dave Hingsburger):

  I'm glad my poppy is on my hat.
  
  I'm glad that some people will think it's 'gay'.
  
  Because gay people fought and died, gay people still fight and still die, in defence of their country, in defence of the freedom. Gay people fought in the First and Second World Wars. Gay people fought for countries that would jail them for who they were. Gay people fought for the ideal of freedom when freedom was denied to them in their home countries.

• Dr. Grumpy on the Navajo code talkers (warning for torture).
• ETA: Driftglass, making a point about the current war(s) via an excerpt from General Daniel P. Bolger in the New York Times.

Strange Juxtapositions

(Is the Dread Dormammu running HYDRA?  It would explain so much.)

• Vagabond Scholar on the ongoing adversarial relationship of civility and bullshit.

  For example, maybe you sincerely believes that someone calling Dick Cheney a "war criminal" is distasteful, because, uh… he hasn't been formally convicted as such. Or it sounds harsh. Okay, but you should be more outraged by what Cheney actually did, his role in constructing a a torture program and his dishonesty in selling a war of choice. Don't agree with all of that? Fine. But the defining feature of civility trolls, the smarm patrol, the bullshitters, is that they're trying to shut honest discussion down. They don't want to investigate. They don't want accountability (not for their team, anyway). For example, there's a reason torture apologists steadfastly ignore all the accounts and mountains of data proving their claims false. Pick another issue if you like; the same dynamics often play out.

• Paul Krugman discusses why conservatives are upset about California.  (AlterNet's Janet Allon, on Mr. Krugman's column.)
• Remember the psychological profiles of conservatives ten years ago that caused some hoo-hah?  More evidence.

  The authors go on to speculate that this ultimately reflects an evolutionary imperative. "One possibility," they write, "is that a strong negativity bias was extremely useful in the Pleistocene," when it would have been super-helpful in preventing you from getting killed.

  (From Mother Jones, via AlterNet.)
  

We Have Stories, and Our Stories Reflect Moral Complexity. They Have Doctrine.

• Sophie's Choice, The Americanization of Emily, and Bradley Manning:  The process of hard choices (and torture).  Arthur Silber, making purveyors of "morality" look like buzzy-voiced unthinking jackals.  
• Via three different sources, one young woman rescued by food stamps (and kindnesses).  Comments unkind to jackals the politicians causing this quandary.

Did the U.S. Turn Guantanamo Over to Kafka When We Weren't Looking?

What is wrong with the United States of America, that we hold and torture innocent people?

The case of Shaker Aamer, a/k/a why Americans should not bring up gulags or concentration camps any more.

Winter Loather

• Terrance at Republic of T on the Republican response to President Obama's inaugural address and second term intentions, or "Mom!  He's not bipartisan anymore, even though we've been obstructing him for years!  Mom!  Make him stop that!  Mom!"  (Also, it may just be me, but when I see the name Kevin McCarthy, I think Invasion of the Body Snatchers.)
• Whistleblowers are getting a raw deal (Mills River Progressive channeling Firedoglake, which is raising money for a YouTube ad for greater awareness); they're being treated worse than the people whose crimes they report.  (AlterNet channeling Democracy Now!)

  To Gov-corp, it's not the atrocities that are the problem, it's the people who have the audacity to point them out, or who try to change the system with activism. (MRP)

  Torture, by the way, is immoral.
• Dragging fascism to the mirror and showing it its face.  (Truthout.org via Avedon's Sideshow.)
• Iron Tongue at Midnight posts various versions of Schubert's Der Erlkönig:  Part I.  Part II.

We Have No Right to Prate About Morality

or:  Arthur Silber is right.

No one will be prosecuted for the deaths of prisoners tortured in Iraq and Afghanistan.

These outcomes should once again focus international attention on the Justice Department’s conduct. Mandatory provisions of the Convention Against Torture should have compelled the department to open criminal inquiries into cases in which concrete and credible allegations of torture exist. It failed even to open inquiries in almost all such cases, and in the tiny handful of cases in which inquiries were opened, Justice Department figures were busy murmuring assurances from the outset that these investigations were a mere formality, and that actual prosecutions were unlikely. So did Durham conduct a bona fide investigation? We can never know the answer to that question, because everything that Durham did was cloaked—as proper process in fact requires—in secrecy.

"Now I've Found/That the World Is Round/And Of Course It Rains Every Day"

Bouquet for the morning:

• Ta-Nehisi Coates on the continuing effort to decouple American history from racism.  Jesse Curtis notes the article and makes a brief observation:

  Many of us want to think of racism only as a sudden evil that intrudes out of nowhere, rather than a pervasive background that shapes all sorts of beliefs and decisions.

• Mr. Curtis also takes down a conservative effort to claim the civil rights movement for Republicans:

  I've written before about the Republican Party's effort to pretend that it is  and always has been the progressive party on issues of race and civil rights. In this week's edition of the premier conservative magazine, National Review, Kevin D. Williamson undertakes the most ambitious effort I've yet seen to advance this myth. This is a real problem for conservatism. Look, in a lot of ways I want to be a conservative. In a lot of ways I am. But how are we to take "conservatism" seriously when its flagship publication is still engaging in such blatant stupidity on issues of race?
  
  [...]
  
  It's not polite to say so, but the irony of Williamson's piece is that its rooted in these racist assumptions. I'd say that considerably undercuts his argument. No one says hedge fund managers are on the plantation because they support the party that gives them tax breaks. No one says corn growers are on the plantation because they vote for people who support ethanol subsidies. No one says pro-lifers are on the plantation because they support a party that still hasn't managed to overturn Roe v. Wade. It's all just normal constituencies voting their interests. But when black people vote their interests, somehow it's a problem that needs to be explained.
  [Emphasis in original.]

• No, not Harry Potter; stock price rises on news of job destruction:

  And we're supposed to believe that NOT ONE of these 27,000 people can possibly be trained to do the jobs in the areas of strategic focus? Seriously? Note what happened today: HP beat Wall Street's expectations, and are STILL jettisoning 27,000 jobs. HP is supposed to be one of the "job creators", isn't it? Don't "Rich People Create Jobs"?

  Jill at Brilliant at Breakfast. For the Win.
  
• Video:  From the London School of Economics and Political Science, the Burning Issue lecture on Human Rights.

  Gearty, a professor of human rights law and a practising barrister, looks at the history of human rights and ideas that have informed their development such as democracy and dignity. He challenges the notion that human rights are a western idea, a mere 'cultural accessory', or that they can be used to justify 'necessary evil' – as an excuse to go to war or to torture as part of interrogation for example.

Enjoy.

Other Voices, Other Rooms

Since I am in the midst of the spring decluttering (the Augean Stables?  Hah!  Easy!), here are some words by other people that particularly struck me this morning (outside of the discovery that the ballyhooed space my alma mater was providing for certain activities has proven to be inadequate to the purpose):

• I repeat: Mitt Rommey, do not start a debate about who is more unprincipled, opportunistic, and pandering during this election, because YOU WILL LOSE THAT FIGHT. And YOU WILL LOSE IT EVERY TIME. And the news of your loss will have to be delivered to each of your twelve gold moon mansions, because no one is sure where you live anymore. (That is a metaphor for your ever-changing positions, Mitt Rommey, JUST IN CASE THAT WASN'T CLEAR!)

  Melissa McEwan, Shakesville

• I grew up in a country that envisioned space travel and technology and science and discovery as good things. Today I live in a country that is one step away from burning witches.

  Jill, Brilliant at Breakfast
  

• Here’s a wild-haired tinfoil hat conspiracy theory for you: I have a friend who is convinced that the Obama Administration cut a deal with the Republican Party. The deal was that the GOP would not field any viable presidential candidate in 2012. In return, the Obama Administration wouldn’t prosecute any Bush Administration officials over the faulty intelligence that led to the Iraq War, their use of torture against detainees, etc.

  Southern Beale
  

• In Lawrence O’Donnell’s America, every dumb-ass in the "press corps" would feel free to ask White House candidates about the pronouncements of their church's leaders from hundreds of years in the past. Do you know how stupid this country would be if that was standard practice?
  
  Pope Pius IX was the head of O’Donnell’s church in 1863. Do you know how many ridiculous things he said? Should Candidate Kerry have been quizzed on these matters in 2004?
  
  If Candidate Kerry had been quizzed, what would Lawrence have done?
  
  One more point about the small tiny mind of the instinctive bigot:
  
  O’Donnell complained that Romney’s church didn’t allow blacks to be priests until 1978. O’Donnell’s church doesn’t allow women to be priests right to this very day! Such awkward comparisons will never occur to pieces of work like O’Donnell and Dowd as they display their instinctive bigotry toward The Other’s religion.
  
  Should journalists have hounded Candidate Kerry about this matter? If they had, what would Lawrence have done? Trust us: He would have screamed and bellowed and yelled.

  Bob Somersby, the daily howler
  

And apparently nobody is pointing up this, probably because it got mentioned last year:  The guy whose lies about WMD of Saddam Hussein justified that stupid war in Iraq confessed on BBC2 as part of a program on spies.  (Modern Spies, which may not be visible in the US.)

I got nothing.

There. Are. No. Words.

As more-or-less promised:  via Just An Earth-Bound Misfit I, links to Guardian articles on renditions and torture:

1. Inner workings of finance and logistics of rendition;
2. "How US firms profited from torture flights" with euphemisms; and
3. How much the planes cost (in monetary terms).

We really have turned into the Roman Empire, haven't we?  Shouldn't Caligula be in the wings?

So,

I'll link to the stuff in the Guardian about rendition and torture in the morning;  right now, via the Mills River Progressive, is OpEd News on the WTFness of law enforcement in these times.  And on the sidebar was this unfortunately named piece by Dr. Albert Ellis.

My head hurts now.

Again?

So my question is:  Do al-Qaida #2 guys double as drummers for Spinal Tap?

(If you can stand it:  Video of John Yoo the torture apologist [and yes, some of the comments will make you livid] in San Francisco.)