Category: Blog

vanityfair.com

I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.

Nah, the war wasn’t about oil….

NYTimes.com

Bush administration officials knew that a Texas oil company with close ties to President Bush was planning to sign an oil deal with the regional Kurdistan government that ran counter to American policy and undercut Iraq’s central government, a Congressional committee has concluded.

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The Kurdistan deal, by ceding responsibility for writing contracts directly to a regional government, infuriated Iraqi officials. But State Department officials did nothing to discourage the deal and in some cases appeared to welcome it, the documents show.

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The release of the documents comes as the administration is defending help that United States officials provided in drawing up a separate set of no-bid contracts, still pending, between Iraq’s Oil Ministry in Baghdad and five major Western oil companies to provide services at other Iraqi oil fields.

In the no-bid contracts, the administration said it had provided what it called purely technical help writing the contracts. The United States played no role in choosing the companies, the administration has said.

Who said the real estate market wasn’t still booming?

CNN.com

The search teams comb through the backyards of the half-million-dollar homes with metal detectors, placing red flags on the manicured lawns every time they get a hit. To the shock of residents, they sometimes find live bombs.
The Army Corps of Engineers digs up metal in search for live bombs in an Orlando neighborhood.

The bombs are left over from a 12,000-acre World War II bombing range. The area has become an Orlando neighborhood with thousands of homes.

Heee! It’s always the giraffe that’s the ring-leader, isn’t it?

Yahoo! News

Amsterdam police say 15 camels, two zebras and an undetermined number of llamas and potbellied swine briefly escaped from a traveling Dutch circus after a giraffe kicked a hole in their cage.

I’m so glad to hear someone with his kind of background and know-how finally point out that McCain’s international experience isn’t quite what he claims it to be.

Jon Soltz: Right On, General Clark. Do Not Back Down. – Politics on The Huffington Post

Because in the matters of national security policy making, it’s a matter of understanding risk. It’s a matter of gauging your opponents, and it’s a matter of being held accountable. John McCain’s never done any of that in his official positions.

Fascinating article on itches and the need to scratch. I heard an interview with the author on NPR last night.

Annals of Medicine: The Itch: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

“Scratching is one of the sweetest gratifications of nature, and as ready at hand as any,” Montaigne wrote. “But repentance follows too annoyingly close at its heels.” For M., certainly, it did: the itching was so torturous, and the area so numb, that her scratching began to go through the skin. At a later office visit, her doctor found a silver-dollar-size patch of scalp where skin had been replaced by scab. M. tried bandaging her head, wearing caps to bed. But her fingernails would always find a way to her flesh, especially while she slept.

One morning, after she was awakened by her bedside alarm, she sat up and, she recalled, “this fluid came down my face, this greenish liquid.” She pressed a square of gauze to her head and went to see her doctor again. M. showed the doctor the fluid on the dressing. The doctor looked closely at the wound. She shined a light on it and in M.’s eyes. Then she walked out of the room and called an ambulance. Only in the Emergency Department at Massachusetts General Hospital, after the doctors started swarming, and one told her she needed surgery now, did M. learn what had happened. She had scratched through her skull during the night—and all the way into her brain.

CNN.com

“Arrogance in this campaign will be perhaps more loaded than it would be in other campaigns,” he said. “They’re trying to say … ‘He’s not one of you.’ “

I guess I’m not the only one who hears the word “uppity” when people like Rove say that Obama is arrogant.

From KXAN.com

There have been high temperatures of 100 degrees or hotter for 17 days, and 16 days of record-breaking temperatures.

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

Amazing photos of the flooding in Iowa. The recovery process for this is going to be long and painful.

More classic Carlin:

• Part one
• Part two