Homo Sum:
humani nil a me alienum puto

OK. Let’s start by quoting Glenn Greenwald, who I love to read at Salon, in an interview with Bill Moyers (himself much lauded around these parts).
Let’s just quickly describe in the most dispassionate terms, as few of euphemisms, as possible, where we are and what has happened over the last eight years. We have a [...]

For a couple of years now, this image has run in the sidebar of this blog:

If you didn’t know what that was about, you can click through and read the post from the time I put it up.
Today, I’m taking it down.
There are two reasons, and both of them amount to my hope that America [...]

The details of the story might not be all I am hoping for, but seeing a headline that says “Cheney and Gonzales Indicted for Prisoner Abuse” is certainly a step in the right direction. Let’s hope it’s one of the first pebbles in an avalanche.

It is now a matter of record that Bush, Cheney, Rice, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, Tenet, and Powell were all directly involved in authorizing the use of torture.
The group called itself the National Security Principals Committee. It held dozens of top-secret decisions in the White House. This according to an ABC News investigation, sourced with unnamed, high-ranking [...]

And then there’s this one, which makes me so angry I’m not sure I can even write coherently about it.
A day after a report revealed Canadian officials knew of Omar Khadr’s harsh treatment by the U.S. military, Prime Minister Stephen Harper on Thursday repeated vows to leave the case in U.S. hands.
…
A Canadian official visiting [...]

Here’s one that both angers me and makes me embarrassed to be a Canadian:
globeandmail.com: Canada deports U.S. army deserter
U.S. army deserter Robin Long was quietly deported from Canada Tuesday morning, while protesters unaware of his whereabouts picketed the Canada-U.S. border crossing south of Vancouver.

The first and most important question here is why are we letting [...]

And in is-anyone-surprised-by-this news, the Senate intel committee’s Phase II report on pre-war intelligence on Iraq is just out.
You can read the details and the reports themselves over at TPM.
I’ll just list some of the choice points from Sen. Rockafeller’s press release, and if any of them surprise you, raise your hand and give yourself [...]

Did you catch the snippet from (retired) General Sanchez’s new book that was in the WaPo earlier this week?
As I was reading this bit:
During a videoconference with his national security team and generals, Sanchez writes, Bush launched into what he described as a “confused” pep talk:
“Kick ass!” he quotes the president as saying. “If somebody [...]

I guess I just think that the best way to honor the sacrifices of our veterans, and the service of our soldiers, and sailors, and marines and airmen, is to not ask them to be killed or maimed in a war we should never have started in the first place. To end the Russian Roulette [...]

I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown [...]

There’s an evil tableau for you: the callous torturer stands up with blood on his hands and a lie in his teeth, while the priest draped in gilt reassures him of his righteousness. How often has that scene played out in history, I wonder?
You know, I wouldn’t change a word in what Paul Myers says [...]

TPMMuckraker | Talking Points Memo | Today’s Must Read
More than five years after its composition, we finally see a copy of John Yoo’s March 14, 2003 memo to William Haynes, then the Defense Department’s general counsel. It was, as The New York Times and Washington Post report, a green light for military interrogators to use [...]

Just for fun, let’s look at what Paul Krugman wrote five years ago.
Snippet one, concerning the U.S. finances:
Meanwhile, consider this: we need $400 billion a year of foreign investment to cover our trade deficit, or the dollar will plunge and our surging budget deficit will become much harder to finance — and there are already [...]

If you had trouble following the last presentation I linked to that explained the subprime crisis and how it’s affecting the broader investment community, then you don’t have a chance with the NYT piece that attempts to take on the same task.
If you could handle the stick figures though, you might want to give the [...]

You know those hoary old SF stories where the hero defeats the robot/intelligent energy matrix/computer/whatever by giving it information that can not be logically processed–isn’t “Is the following statement true? ‘This statement is false.’” the classic one?–and thus causing the super-powerful processing of the robot/intelligent energy matrix/computer/whatever to burn out, usually accompanied by a nice [...]