The Dish

Science is getting closer to the perfect body.

Recycle plastic six-pack plastic ring holders into this. The saved dolphins won’t help you though:

The evidence, it seems, doesn’t support claims that children and some adults suffering from physical and mental illnesses can improve their health by getting in the water and interacting with dolphins (usually bottlenose dolphins, Tursiops truncatus). Every now and then a study pops up that purports to find real benefits to DAT, but when Lori Marino and Scott O. Lilienfeld of Emory University in Georgia put those studies under the microscope, they found all suffered from serious methodological shortcomings.

The lawsuit ended last Friday.

"I saw female lions go after warthogs while the male just laid there and watched. Which I thought was good preparation for my future, given this campaign, you know. Just sort of lay there and watch, you know…  Right in front of our vehicle this female lion caught this warthog, picked him up by the back of the neck, and went like that and broke his neck. It was pretty gory. So much for peace in our time," – Bill Clinton on Letterman.

"Peter the Third abolished the torture-chamber, and the Russian star chamber. Catherine the Second abolished torture. Alexander the First abolished it over again. Evidence given under torture is legally inadmissible, and any magistrate applying torture is himself liable to prosecution and severe punishment.
That is so: and all over Russia, from the Bering Straits to the Crimea, men suffer torture. When flogging is unsafe, other means are used – intolerable heat, thirst, salt food; in Moscow the police made a prisoner stand barefooted on an iron floor, at a time of intense frost; the man died in a hospital," – "The Memoirs of Alexander Herzen" (1830).

Notice how Herzen was quite clear that hypothermia, stress positions, dietary manipulation and extreme heat are all clearly torture. That definition – once taken for granted – is something rejected by almost all the Republican candidates, apart from McCain. Notice also how it occurred in Russia despite an official ban. And yet the president of the United States has fought tenaciously to retain it in his arsenal of war-powers. America was once a leader in human rights. Under Bush, we’re becoming a global force for the normalization of torture. It spreads, is spreading, and is very hard to stop. And America is legitimizing it in every ghastly prison and by every hideous regime in the world.

They came today, and since many of you have asked to see a few, here are a handful. Seeing them again reminds me of the dreamy dusk and night that we chose – a full moon over the water, and family and friends-who-are-family sending the love right back at us. This was not – repeat not – a political event. But it took politics to get past politics, and to see this movement we are a part of as a human endeavor to bring love and civility and family into lives that have sometimes been denied all of the above.  We were denied no love that night, and received so much support and kindness and affirmation that we’re still a little giddy. It was more than I ever expected, in a place I love, with people who love both Aaron and me.

More after the jump.

A huge thank you to those friends who made this possible. To Steve Frappolli who did the food, Michael Stuetz, who took the photos and who can be reached here, Frankie Rice for the astonishing driftwood arbor (FrankieBRice@yahoo.com), Liz Lovati of Angel Foods for the cake, and Bryan Rafanelli, who created the entire dream. If you want an event that somehow transcends your highest expectations, hire him.

The first day after my honeymoon, I tried to read as many analyses of the surge’s results as I could find. None came close to being as good as Hilzoy’s elegant, brief and devastatingly logical post on this blog last week. Here it is again. I cannot improve on it. If you have a solid argument against any of Hilary’s points, let me know. She’s not being partisan. She’s making arguments I have yet to hear persuasively refuted. If you missed it, do yourself a favor.

It’s the great imponderable, the massive potential game-changer in the Middle East: an internal shift in Iran, either toward reform or even more draconian repression. The clues, alas, are mixed. The NYT reports today on a cratering economy, but warns that this might empower the religious nutjobs. The Guardian offers a more hopeful piece of political news, the reemergence of Rafsanjani, which is greeted with relief from the Newshoggers, who say it underscores

the often-overlooked fact that the "Hitleresque dictator" President Ahmadinejad is term limited by the Iranian constitution. By 2014 at the latest he will no longer be in power. Indeed, with recent developments it is becoming more likely that he won’t be in office by the end of 2008.

Kevin Sullivan differs:

This is also seen as a blow for Ahmadinejad.  Far from it.  As I’ve also argued in the past, Ahmadinejad is perhaps the most politically savvy president ever witnessed in post-Revolution Iran. While insider operatives like Rafsanjani consolidate power at the top, Ahmadinejad knows how to garner support at the grassroots.

…I’ve made the case before, and I’ll restate it here – a weaker Supreme Leader could lead to a stronger presidential executive. The constitution states that Ahmadinejad is the second most powerful figure in the country. If Khamenei is weakened (or even removed), it’ll leave a power vacuum. Ahmadinejad is tied to the conservative elements that still influence the Assembly. He is a former member of the Revolutionary Guard, with close ties to their infrastructure. And again, unlike Rafsanjani, he knows how to build genuinely popular support.

There is a critical mass of rumors in DC that Cheney and Bush are planning a massive military strike on Iran within a few months. That may be part of the reason the Brits are in such a rush to get out of the South of Iraq. It may well be, given the president’s belief in his unchecked power to do as he wills in foreign policy, that our best bet against a third war is within Iran, not America.

A carbon tax seems to me to be the most urgent domestic economic reform facing us. And a carbon tax is the simplest, cleanest and most market-friendly device to wean Americans off oil, defund some of our enemies, and protect the planet from drastic climate change. And yet it seems such a tax is still political poison. That John Dingell is inching toward such a proposal is therefore very good news. It’s also good to witness a politician able to change his mind in the open and with a decent amount of class:

After the town hall meeting was over — and he had listened to a couple of hours of questions about timed traffic lights, nuclear power and the possibility of impeaching President Bush — Mr. Dingell sat down in a dark area behind the stage. I asked him whether Mr. Gore, who has been both a Dingell nemesis and ally at various times, had been right for all those years he was pointing out what was happening to the earth’s climate.

"I think a cold statement on that point would be yes," Mr. Dingell replied.

And would it have been easier to solve the problem if we had started earlier?

"What’s the saying? The saddest words in the English language — ‘might have been.’"

Scott Horton translates the German press. Money quote:

The three terror suspects said to have planned massive attacks in Germany are in accordance with investigations to date members of a German cell of the Islamic Jihad Union. This organization is said to stand in close contact with al Qaeda.

The Islamic Jihad Union is according to information provided by Attorney General Monika Harms a Sunni group which is principally active in Central Asia, which split off of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. The German cell was founded in the winter of 2006.

According to a report of the U.S. Department of State from April 2007, this group is pursuing objectives in Uzbekistan such as the toppling of Uzbek President Islam Karimov and the establishment there of an Islamic state. In early 2004 a total of 47 people were killed in attacks on local markets and police stations according to this information, among them 33 terrorists.

So the travails of Uzbekistan end up potentially killing Americans in Germany. Welcome to our new world.