The Dish

The ACLU discovers another piece of withheld evidence of possible war crimes by members of the Bush-Cheney administration. We don’t know what’s in it yet, and a judge will begin adjudicating whether we will be able to find out one day. The memo was penned by Steven Bradbury. Money quote from Spencer Ackerman:

Of course, the sudden appearance of the 2005 Bradbury-supervised OLC memos raises the possibility that the administration is still hiding other torture memos. "We’ve always had that suspicion," ACLU attorney Jameel Jaffer says, explaining that the ACLU knows of "dozens" of torture documents yet to be released to the ACLU FOIA. Those, he says, include photos of prisoners "not from Abu Ghraib" subjected to brutal interrogations, as well as documents relevant to the CIA inspector-general inquiry into prisoner abuse by the CIA at Iraq and Afghanistan. (That inquiry was one of several that led General Mike Hayden, director of the CIA, to open an inquiry on the inspector general.)

So is the government acting in good faith? "I don’t know. I just don’t know," Jaffer says.

Cheney? Oh yes, we do. Oh yes, we do.

A great idea. The man is a war criminal, and has done more to undermine our Constitutional balance than any man since Richard Nixon. Secretive, incompetent, belligerent, contemptuous of the rule of law, there is barely a bad decision this president has made that doesn’t have Cheney’s fingerprints on it. Of course, the Democrats are scared of taking on this man. But they are, by and large, a bunch of empty suits (and one botoxed empty pant-suit). I’m delighted the Congress is finally tackling the issue of the vice-president’s attack on the constitution. If done right, it could help air the fundamental indecency that Cheney represents. But, of course, it won’t be done right. Which is why I remain someone who, abandoned by the current Republicans, still can’t even think of identifying as a Democrat.

HM Queen Elizabeth II looks out of her carriage as she travels to the State Opening of Parliament on November 6, 2007 in London. The Queen’s Speech, the first for new British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, is expected to introduce legislative bills on education, immigration , housing and counter-terrorism. By Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images.

My interview with Jennie Rothenberg Gritz at the Atlantic is now up. The interview covers a lot of ground. One nugget:

Do you think you’d feel restless if you were sitting on the sidelines, watching the online medium continue to evolve?

Who knows? But the nice thing about the Web is that it is so obviously its own organic being. You contribute to it, but you don’t control it. And you don’t want to control it. I like that about it. I think it’s actually changed my politics a little bit. I think I’ve become more libertarian as I’ve understood this medium.

That’s interesting. Your politics have changed because of the nature of the medium itself?

Yes, I’ve become more skeptical of doctrines and more skeptical of ideology and more skeptical of dogmatism. Including my own, occasionally. I think that my faith life, for example, has become more deconstructed than it was and has allowed me to entertain doubt more thoroughly.

But of course, it also helps to have been fantastically wrong about the Iraq War, the most important decision made in national life in a long time, and to have spent the last five years accounting for that and trying to explain that and understand it better. I think my readers—I hope, anyway—forgive me for some of that, as long as I’m candid and honest about it.

The task of talking out loud about one’s own mistakes is a very helpful thing to do. I think it’s more helpful than pretending you know everything and proclaiming every now and again from some high horse what the truth is. Blogging is a whole new way of writing, and a new way of experiencing the world. It’s very real and very human.

A new poll shows 70 percent of gay Americans are fine with excluding the transgendered from proposed federal employment protections for now. Since Bush will veto any pro-gay bills, this is more theoretically interesting than politically salient. I don’t think the federal ENDA is going to make much of a difference in gay life, but I’m not against it as such any more. (I was more against making it the sole focus of the gay rights movement for the last two decades, at the expense of military service and marriage rights). I’m also in favor of maximal inclusion of people with gender conflicts or transgender identity. But politics is about compromise and persuasion. Just as I can live with civil unions as a temporary bridge to marriage, and I can live with a federalist diversity on gay couples, so I can live with an incremental approach to legislation. The gay left will have a cow.  But they have long been out of step with many average, non-ideological homos and lesbians. Persuade, and explain. Those should be our first steps. It’s exhausting but necessary.

The great Democratic hope.

A Mark Penn connection.

Drum’s poll – a Malkin Award All Time Contest – brings out the best in the far right blogosphere.

Fox and Friends bring you the news:

How the FBI tries to find Iranian terror cells. Can’t you just round up some Persian-Americans and enhancedly interrogate them? I mean, we don’t want a mushroom cloud in an American city, do we? And nothing works like "the program", right?