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Arab reaction to the shoe thrower:

Is he being tortured?


This report suggests he might.

It occurs to me that the job of the liberal blogger is basically to make this point over and over and over again.

A look at today's Taliban

Scott Horton:

How often in our nation’s history has a Congressional Committee published a report which concludes that the President is essentially guilty of war crimes? Only once. It happened last week with the release of the Senate Armed Services Committee report on prisoner abuse. Put a sharper point on it: war crimes that produce the death of a detainee are punishable with the death sentence. And in this case we now have more than one hundred deaths potentially linkable to detainee abuse, linked to the President. Yet to the American mainstream media, which has made virtually no effort to comprehend the report, it was a non-event.

Vanity Fair has an article on why torture doesn't work

Did Cheney admit to committing war crimes?:

Rachel Maddow talks to the guy that revealed the illegal spying program:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

The NYT on Obama's relationship with the press

Digby:

It's a coincidence, I'm sure, that they only feel the need to make sure that politicians don't "get away with"anything when the politician is a Democrat and they only need to prove they aren't reflexively hostile when it's a Republican.

The Economist weighs in on Caroline Kennedy



Ezra Klein basically agrees, but makes a number of points in her favor along the way, and basically convinces me that appointing her is a good idea. Look, if we want to consider changing the rules so that Governers don't get to make appointments in these situations in favor of special elections, I'm all for of that. But at present those are not the rules, and to ask Dems to tie one hand behind their back is not only unfair, it will have real moral implications... when someone doesn't get healthcare and dies, or goes to war without the right kinds of body armor, or whatever, that has far more real world implication than whether or not appointing someone from a well connected family really serves Democracy. If appointed she'll face the voters in a couple years. Sure, it's ugly, but the last 8 years have been far uglier.



Matt Yglesias makes a related point.

Obama makes an, uh, unfortunate choice for who will deliver the inaugural invocation. I don't want to just reflexively defend everything Obama does, but I will at least throw out there that this decision really only has symbolic meaning and no real policy implications... perhaps Obama's thinking this would be a way to score some points with social conservatives without really giving them anything. But I still find it.... unfortunate.

2008 electoral map, weighted:

U.Va. Center for Politics

new old Obama pics: