Unqualified Offerings

I agree with joe in comments downblog: we’ve got conflicting reports whether Eric Holder intends to include bigwigs in a pending special-prosecutor investigation into Bush-era torture policies. Scott Horton says yes; Carrie Johnson says no. I agree with my esteemed coblogger that if Holder only sets the dogs loose on comparative small-fry and lets the [...]

By Thoreau
The latest trial balloon being floated by DOJ is that torturers will be prosecuted, but only if they exceed the limits laid down by John Yoo.  As Tim at Balloon Juice explains, this means that John Yoo’s memos are to be treated as law.
If they were simply cautious in picking only the strongest cases [...]

Upgrade went smoothly via my host’s Fantastico installer. The orphan theme sort of works:
1. All views work in Google Chrome. Perhaps this means all views also work in Safari, since both use the Webkit rendering engine?
2. Full-page view works in Firefox 3.5, Opera 9.64 and IE8. Individual-post view is hinky, but not unreadably hinky. I’ll [...]

In a moment I’m going to try to upgrade the blog to Wordpress 2.8. This will probably break the template (sorry Unqualified Dog!) and who knows what else. If all goes well, there will be no significant service interruption. If it doesn’t go well, we’ll all beg for jobs at Balloon Juice, I guess. It [...]

By Thoreau
Today I read an article about torture in Evin prison.  Nothing I didn’t know before, but John Yoo was on my mind, since I had just learned that he was called upon to approve whateverthehell secret program they won’t tell us about.  So I started boiling when I read this:
Over that month in Evin, [...]

By Thoreau
I’ve had less political blogging lately, even about matters related to war and civil liberties, because I’m getting burned out on politics.  Being at a state university in a state with apocalyptic politics at the moment, all of the state and internal politics does a number on my brain.  However, some quick responses to [...]

By Thoreau
I just saw the Transformers movie this evening, and it was awesome.  Took me back to my childhood.  Here’s a movie that delivers fight scenes that you can follow, a great soundtrack, great one-liners, a planet-destroying threat, no distracting subplots, the comic relief characters didn’t ruin their scenes, and there was genuine suspense about [...]