Category Archives: Current Events

Michael Moore writes about Bernie Madoff. I don't know that I agree with everything Moore says in this but I agree that if we're going to be tossing people into cells for financial skullduggery, Bernie deserves to have a lot of roommates.

Fred Kaplan discusses movies that reflect or illuminate the world of diplomacy. I agree about Duck Soup.

Matt Yglesias writes about the unconvincing case for torture. I keep reading arguments, many of them from folks with solid experience in this area, who say torture does not produce useful intelligence; that its only real value is the way it was used on John McCain: To try and extract false confessions for political advantage. And I keep reading arguments for torture from folks who act like it's inarguable that torture is a great tool, especially for quashing "ticking time bomb" scenarios. What I'd like to see is the latter group seriously address the assertions of the former.

Joe Conason on Dick Cheney's claims that secret memos will reveal that torture worked well. Since when did Dick Cheney keep anything secret that could benefit him?

Paul Begala says (and seems to have proof) that the United States of America executed Japanese war criminals for the act of waterboarding. Gee, we seemed to think it was torture then.

Who's one of the most "bipartisan" Senators in the U.S. Senate? Ted Kennedy.

What, you think that's nuts? Don't argue with me. Argue with his fellow Senators. That's who they named in this survey conducted by The Hill…with Susan Collins as the most bipartisan Republican. It might also surprise you to read who some of them consider good friends and colleagues.

George W. Bush takes a strong, principled stand against torture.

For a while, those decrying our country's use of torture were arguing that above and beyond its illegality and immorality, it just plain doesn't work and is most likely to lead to false confessions. What seems to be emerging now, thanks to this story from the McClatchy News Service, is that false confessions — particularly of a Saddam-al Qaida link, were precisely what were wanted.

Nate Silver thinks the Republican Party is morphing into the Libertarian Party. Some might argue it's the other way around.

Obama's critics are outraged about his friendly greeting to Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. I think some of these folks think their job in life is to get outraged about absolutely everything the man does. It's like if Obama eats a grilled cheese sandwich, they're off in meetings somewhere, trying to figure out how to be outraged about grilled cheese sandwiches. Anyway, Fred Kaplan has a good piece about how Obama is trying something we haven't seen in a long time with regard to international diplomacy. It's called international diplomacy.

We heard a lot this last week about how "tea parties" were protests, in the tradition of the original Boston Tea Party, against the government raising taxes. But as Thom Hartmann notes, that original Boston Tea Party was mainly a protest against tax cuts for big corporations.

Public outrage is growing about the greatest affront to human decency in the world today. I am speaking, of course, of the font Comic Sans.

Hey, remember that clip of Susan Boyle you watched here or on some other site? The lady who wowed them on Britain's Got Talent? Well, my ex-partner Dennis Palumbo has a good point to make about her and the reaction to her.

And here's Ezra Klein defending the Teabaggers. Sort of. His view of them is not completely incompatible with Matt Taibbi's.

I have three or four correspondents who will write to scold me for linking to this Matt Taibbi piece because he name-calls and talks dirty but the guy makes a strong, important point: The protests about government spending were negligible when we were shovelling billions into corporate coffers or rebuilding the power grid in Bagdad. They didn't even complain when huge sums designated for the Iraq War completely disappeared. It only became the kind of outrage where you have to take to the street with signs when we started spending money on the infrastructure of this country.