Unqualified Offerings

Mona gives us just the facts, ma’am, below. Valerie Plame Wilson was a covert officer at the time several Bush Administration officials burned her, and had traveled overseas repeatedly in the recent past, under cover every time. (pdf of the Patrick Fitzgerald sentencing brief.) So let’s engage in irresponsible speculation, shall we!
A common right-wing talking [...]

By Thoreau
A little while ago on CNN I saw some footage of Adam Gadahn, the Al Qaeda spokesman who grew up in southern California. He seemed like a real loser just from his demeanor (and the fact that he chose the Al Qaeda career path sure confirms that). So I just checked out [...]

By Mona
I’ve been studiously agnostic on Plamegate, which ends today. The idea that Patrick Fitzgerald would make court filings pertaining to the Scooter Libby sentencing that are false is preposterous, and as Larry Johnson sums it up, Fitz sez:

Valerie Wilson was an operations officer working in the Counter Proliferation Division (CPD) [...]

By Thoreau
One final item of science blogging.  A guest columnist in The Onion writes that “I believe in evolution, except for the Triassic Period.”
We need to get the Triassic period expunged from our public schools’ evolutionary textbooks. I don’t want my children to be exposed to this blasphemous Triassic garbage, and I assume you don’t [...]

By Thoreau
A new paper in the Public Library of Science (open access, with a layman’s description here) suggests that if we suffer mass outbreaks of bird flu among humans, the initial survivors might hold the key to saving people subsequently infected:
For the new study, researchers at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in Ho Chi Minh [...]

By Thoreau
Most of the extrasolar planets that have been found thus far have been very close to their parent star. That’s a problem for finding life if the parent star is bright, but it may not be such a problem if the star is dim. And the most common stars in our galaxy [...]

by BruceB (Thanks, Patrick, name now added at the top.)
For me, at least, one of the hardest things about the Iraq occupation has been the loss of a basic confidence in my right to be considered one of the good guys. I raised to believe in my potential to do good, and in the appropriateness [...]

By Mona
Childish rhetoric such as calling the President “Bushitler,” and the like, hasn’t been my style. It may be time to reconsider. Andrew Sullivan, has some historical documents from the Nazi regime:
What I am reporting is a simple empirical fact: the interrogation methods approved and defended by this president are not new. Many have been [...]