Category: The Dish

Romney pledges to combat "indolence and perversion." No actual policies mentioned.

"I’m shocked, shocked …" Casablanca, of course. How to pick from the countless best lines ever from that glorious movie is an impossible task. So take this as a summary of all of them:

"I won’t mention anyone’s name. But I have every reason to believe that the fur is going to start to fly, perhaps sooner than what they may have wanted," – Senator George Voinovich, on CNN.com. In private, CNN reports, Voinovich simply says that Bush "fucked up the war."

Heh.

A promising new treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, something many veterans of Iraq will be grappling with in the months and years ahead.

The mullahs torture a man deported from the UK:

"It was really, really cold without any glass in the windows. It was snowing – I was really cold – I only had my T-shirt on and they kept me two days there without any food. My profile was handed to the NSA – the National Security Agency. They tortured me, beat me up, asked me what I was doing in England, who was supporting me, whose idea was it to stitch up my face and lips and be against the Iranian government. They didn’t show me any mercy… kicking me, punching me and sometimes using their batons to beat me up. They just beat me up and made ready my case to the court."

From the hypothermia to the dietary manipulation to the beatings: will Rudy Giuliani explain why this is not torture when the US does it?

Peter Berkowitz is unimpressed.

Not every blogger spends his airplane rides re-translating Heidegger’s favorite poet, Friedrich Holderlin. But then not every blogger is Scott Horton:

God is near
Yet hard to seize.
Where there is danger,
The rescue grows as well.
Eagles live in the darkness,
And the sons of the Alps
Go fearlessly over the abyss
Upon bridges simply built.
Therefore, since the peaks
Of Time are heaped all about,
And dear ones live close by,
Worn down on the most separated mountains —
Then give us innocent waters;
Give us wings, and the truest minds
To voyage over and then again to return…

The fight is ongoing. My respect for CNN increases. Here’s the propagandist’s open letter to the network. Here’s their response.

Could circumcision be affecting women’s sex lives? Some say yes.