Thousands have now voted in the contest to find a cover image for the forthcoming "View From Your Window" book. The final windows are from Rome, DC, Silver Spring, New Orleans, Pebble Beach, Mauritania, Vietnam, New York City, Wisconsin, and Fort Lauderdale.
The results of the voting so far are here. New Orleans is in the lead, but the runner-up will also have a smaller place on the back cover, so your votes count for second as well. Polls are still open. Vote here.
A video discovered. And a mullet.
The torture debate will continue next week in the Senate Judiciary sub-committee. For a change, the people who actually resisted the war crimes, rather than those who enabled them, will be talking.
Her supporters fight back:
Maine votes today. You can watch live video and audio here.
The Atlantic.com just won the Webby for 
them. It's been a journey and a half. For the last three years, James Bennet and David Bradley built a team to create a website almost from scratch using the blogosphere as an inspiration and then building out and up. We're not even close to hitting our stride but it's been a really rewarding and creative time for me and Patrick and Chris and we're proud to be a part of it all.
Congrats to Marc and Megan and Corby for their politics and business and food sections, to our designer, Jason, to our new editorial boss, Bob, and to Ta-Nehisi, Jim, Jeffrey and Clive, for their voices and input. And thanks to you, for all the rest.
Portland, Oregon, 7.40 am
The Shiite death-squads have been unleashed against homosexual Iraqis. I can barely believe the torture-murder technique that is reported here, but the morgues apparently confirm it.
The banks are at it again. Salmon:
Here’s Matthew Richardson and Nouriel Roubini writing in the WSJ this morning:
Consider also recent bank risk-taking. The media has recently reported that Citigroup and Bank of America were buying up some of the AAA-tranches of nonprime mortgage-backed securities. Didn’t the government provide insurance on portfolios of $300 billion and $118 billion on the very same stuff for Citi and BofA this past year? These securities are at the heart of the financial crisis and the core of the PPIP. If true, this is egregious behavior — and it’s incredible that there are no restrictions against it.
But if there were restrictions against this behavior in particular, the same banks, or other banks, would find other ways to chase risk, just because they’re so confident that they can make billions of dollars — and get themselves out of their present hole — by doing so. They might even be right: 95% of the time, they probably are right. But that’s the Rubin trade: it works until it doesn’t. And although it’s the easy solution to the problem, it’s also a very worrying solution to the problem, because it just sets up yet another inevitable meltdown at some unknown point in the future.
And the beat goes on.
He doesn't actually, and it helps illuminate what happened under the Bush-Cheney administration. Here's the former attorney-general's – yes, this man was attorney-general! – chilling statement on the illegal use of torture techniques by the man he worked for:
They may be necessary in the future. And by disclosing it, means you take them off the table and they can never be used again.
David Waldman has a must-read in response:
As tiresome as it can sometimes be to see people frame matters so that it all comes down to one issue and one issue only, I find myself returning to this one again and again. Whether or not torture is your issue. Or wiretapping. Or indefinite detention. Or signing statements. Or anything, really — environment, global warming, abortion, health care, taxes, terrorism, the war. No matter what your issue is, at heart, you're dependent on a continuing and consistent respect for the law. Because without it, none of your work on politics and policy is worth anything the moment the White House falls to someone who's not you.
You can pass all the environmental laws you like, but if it's accepted as a legitimate tenet of Republican governing philosophy that all of those laws can be safely ignored or otherwise set aside, you'll have gained nothing from your work with a friendly Congress and administration.
And if you can set aside all statutory and constitutional law on something like torture, I'm unsure what barriers you think remain in the way of doing the same on any other issue…
They are telling you they will torture again in the future. They have already told you that it is their belief — their interpretation of the four corners of the Constitution — that they have the right to order it if they can win just one national election (versus Democrats' constant scrambling to win 300+ localized contests).
There is nothing "backward looking" about giving serious consideration to a live threat that has just been renewed.
The Dish 