The daughter of the vice-president has given birth to a baby boy. Money quote from the Christianist media:
According to reports, Mary’s homosexual partner of 15 years, Heather Poe, "will have no legal relationship with her child. She can’t adopt as a second parent. She won’t have her name on the birth certificate."
It’s such an important Christian value to keep a child vulnerable, isn’t it? And to stigmatize and discriminate against one of his moms.
The master of the bureaucracy made sure the Pentagon never comprehensively investigated the torture he personally authorized – and made sure he was never held in any way responsible. A just declassified Pentagon study sheds some light on impressive maneuvring by the retired war criminal.
A reader writes:
There is saying around certain well-known 12 step programs that we ‘act our way into better thinking’ rather than ‘think our way into better actions’.
I have been reading many of the links, comments and, of course, your blog entries regarding torture for some time and it hit me this morning that this, for me, is the crux of the disagreement. Some of the smartest pro-torture bloggers and commenters out there find one perceived legal lor moral loophole after another, as if by applying their considerable brainpower to the matter they can somehow escape the essential truth that torturing people is just bad behavior. I can relate to the way their minds work.
If I dare to compare the conduct of a democratic nation to that of an individual like myself, a recovering addict, I see the temptation to rationalize behavior on the basis of the survival instinct as a deepening swamp of fear – the fear leads to sadistic thinking, justifications and the loathing of the ‘other’. Then I lose all circumspection attained by a clear-eyed view of my own past wrongdoings. Any dignity I have achieved by making amends for past misdeeds or harm to others is wiped out by my justifications for these new survival strategies.
Just as I have lost my way on the path to personal dignity as a recovering addict on a few occasions, I long for the time when the conduct of our elected officials, employees and agents is codified to the degree that there’s no more than one person who can equivocate the matter of whether to torture or not. We take presidential elections seriously for a reason, and that man or woman’s judgment to step away from ‘right action’ at such a juncture should surely be one of the criteria by which we elect them.
Tyler Cowen has some fun proposals:
1. Allow all candidates to watch a short debate of experts — with a fraud or two thrown in — and ask them to evaluate what they just heard and why they reached the conclusion they did.
2. Test candidates for the ability to spot liars.
3. Give each candidate a substantive message and then give each two minutes to turn it into pure fluff. This tests communications skills, plus we can see the meat grinder in action.
4. Require each candidate to conduct an orchestra. Watch to what extent each candidate defers to the players, and to what extent he prefers "panache."
Or ask them, if all else fails, what they’d actually do in Iraq if they were president right now. There’s a concept.
The gap between him and Rudy continues to narrow.
ABC News reports on the president’s authorization of covert action against Iran. It’s not a military initiative, and should have been authorized years ago. It’s also surely no big whoop. It is obviously in the West’s interests to do all we can to support the Persian opposition, to help disseminate the truth about the theocracy, to throw as much money as we can at the forces of freedom in that country. But the angry response from some of the Bushite blogs has Brad Plumer worried:
Let’s see, I count one, two, three conservative bloggers all saying the same thing: Now that ABC News has blown the lid off the president’s secret plan to have the CIA destabilize the Iranian regime from within, the only option we have left is to take military action. Bush never wanted war, mind you, but the liberal media and those loose-lipped "traitors" in the agency have left him no choice.
I see this leak as being a complete non-event. Both Plumer’s response to the bloggers and the bloggers’ own response to ABC News’ little scoop strike me as more than a little paranoid.
The truth? Self-serving spin? Make your own mind up. But Mike Crowley has a very juicy story.
Three day old nameless elephant baby plays in his enclosure at the Zoological Garden (Tierpark) Berlin on May 23, 2007 in Berlin, Germany. The Zoological Garden presented today the new born elephant for the public. By Andreas Rentz/Getty.
In Lubbock, Texas, after a raid on a lingerie shop, the owner may have to register as a sex offender.
Mental Floss counts the ways.
