Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Recommended Reading

George F. Will discusses the British terrorist bust and what it may mean to us. One of the things he thinks it means is that John Kerry was right when he said that although the war on terror will be "occasionally military," it is "primarily an intelligence and law enforcement operation that requires cooperation around the world." Of course, when Kerry said that, no Conservative — not even Mr. Will — would view it as anything other than some sort of admission of weakness.

• Posted at 9:52 PM · LINK

Recommended Reading

Joe Darby is the man who blew the whistle on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. He has come forward to tell his story and it's well worth your attention. I'll let you read the descriptions of torture for yourself but here's one section that's startling in another way. It comes after Darby has reported multiple abuses of law and morality to his superiors...

So I knew if I wanted to go back to my civilian life, if I wanted to integrate back home, nobody could know what I'd done. They'd never forgive me. And I was assured by the army that nobody would know. I would remain anonymous.

Well, it didn't work out that way. About a month after Graner and the rest of them left Abu Ghraib, we were up in Camp Anaconda, and I was sitting with ten other guys from my platoon in the dining facility. It's a big facility, packed with like 400 other soldiers, and I'm sitting there eating when Donald Rumsfeld comes on during the damned congressional hearings. It was like something out of a movie. I'm sitting there, and right next to me there's a TV, and Rumsfeld is on it when he drops my damned name. Almost nobody in my unit knew what I'd done until he dropped my damned name. On national TV. I was sitting midbite when he said it, and I was like, Oh, my God. And the guys at the table just stopped eating and looked at me.

So they promised his name would remain secret and then Rumsfeld went before Congress — on international TV — and volunteered the name of the informant. Lovely. Do we think this was a screw-up or a punishment? Neither is particularly admirable.

• Posted at 7:18 PM · LINK

Fair Warning

This made me laugh out loud so I had to share it here. It sounds a lot like a certain Monty Python sketch...

Welsh-speaking cyclists have been left baffled — and possibly concerned for their health — after a bizarre translation mix-up.

The temporary sign, placed in front of the roadworks at Barons Court roundabout between Penarth and Cardiff, correctly says "cyclists dismount" in English, but says "llid y bledren dymchwelyd" in Welsh.

Owain Sgiv, an officer for the Welsh language campaign group Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg, explained: "Roughly translated, 'llid y bledren dymchwelyd' means 'bladder disease has returned.'"

• Posted at 7:05 PM · LINK

Recommended Reading

Rich Lowry on why Iraq is looking more and more like Bush's Vietnam. This is another one of those articles where I don't agree with every word but I think the view is worth a read.

• Posted at 12:06 PM · LINK

Assault and Battery

Here's another way that bloggers can have an impact on the world. For some time now, tech blogs have been complaining about the tendency of the batteries in Dell Laptops to explode and burst into flame. Here's an example. Here's another example. Here's another example. Here are photos of a Dell Laptop exploding at a conference in Japan.

Dell has now announced what may be the largest recall in the history of consumer electronics. It's possible they would have done this anyway but the bloggers probably hurried things up a bit. And that means that a few less laptops will go kablooey, which is a good thing.

By the way: You can't bring a bottle of Arrowhead Mountain Spring Water onto an airplane in this country. But you can bring a Dell Laptop with a battery that can explode and burst into flame. Fill in your own snide remark.

• Posted at 12:23 AM · LINK

Recommended Reading

Adam Cohen discusses the legal heritage of Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court decision that first put George W. Bush into the White House. Here's the paragraph that most interested me...

The heart of Bush v. Gore's analysis was its holding that the recount was unacceptable because the standards for vote counting varied from county to county. Having once granted the right to vote on equal terms, the court declared, the state may not, by later arbitrary and disparate treatment, value one person's vote over that of another. If this equal protection principle is taken seriously, if it was not just a pretext to put a preferred candidate in the White House, it should mean that states cannot provide some voters better voting machines, shorter lines, or more lenient standards for when their provisional ballots get counted — precisely the system that exists across the country right now.

So, uh, how come that hasn't changed?

I know a lot of Republicans (including Antonin Scalia) tell Democrats to "get over it" but the article has a point: If it was valid law, it doesn't go away. It should be defensible in the context of ongoing legal decisions. By the way, the last person who told me to "get over it" is still posting in chat rooms that the Clintons should be arrested for the murder of Vince Foster.

I have a feeling that we're going to wake up one morning and find that some future configuration of the Supreme Court has said Bush should never have been installed in the job in 2000. The way things are going, we may see a majority of Republicans say that before long.

• Posted at 12:19 AM · LINK

Duh...

For those of you who find Sudoku puzzles too complicated, the Washington Post had one yesterday that Goober Pyle could solve in under three minutes. Here it is. It's almost as tough as the one I posted a few weeks ago.

• Posted at 12:19 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

How'd you like to watch six minutes all about the original, 1975 production of the Broadway show, Chicago? The two men interviewed together are the men responsible for its score, John Kander and the late Fred Ebb. They talk about its director, Bob Fosse. Gwen Verdon and Ann Reinking talk about Bob Fosse. I think the guy at the end is New York Times political commentator (then, its Broadway critic), Frank Rich.

There's also some footage here of the original cast and one of the dancers you'll see is the lovely, leggy Charlene Ryan who was a Fosse favorite. (She was also in the both original Sweet Charity on Broadway and in the movie.) Charlene is now married to my friend, Sergio Aragonés. Every time I refer to Sergio as "the fastest cartoonist in the world," Charlene sighs and says, "Tell me about it."

And on that cheap sex joke, let's go the videotape...

• Posted at 12:14 AM · LINK