Buh-Bye, Bag

One of the straps tore off my school knapsack today. Considering how heavy my laptop is, I’m not too surprised; it was bound to happen sooner or later. But I’m bummed because it was my PalmSource knapsack, and it’ll be a long time before I see nice schwag like that again.

Liar Liar

Which one of these is NOT a liar?

A White House document shows that executives from big oil companies met with Vice President Cheney’s energy task force in 2001 — something long suspected by environmentalists but denied as recently as last week by industry officials testifying before Congress.

No wonder they didn’t want to be under oath in front of Congress.

De-”24″-ing the Torture Issue

Thanks Kevin, well put:

Torture should be flatly illegal because that’s the message we want to send both to our own people and to the rest of the world. Legal torture should be reserved for regimes like Cuba and North Korea, not the United States of America.

However, in the fantastically unlikely 24-esque event that we capture a terrorist who knows the location of a ticking atomic bomb, he’s going to get tortured regardless. The torturer will immediately get pardoned by the president for doing so, and would be unanimously acquitted by a jury even if he weren’t. And I’m fine with that.

So please. Enough with the idiotic ticking time bomb already. If we’re going to talk about torture, let’s talk about how it’s used in the real world.

Drive-by blogging

Busy week; exam tomorrow, case study & presentation Wednesday, another exam next week, other projects due on the horizon.

In the meantime, Digby‘s got a few good ones — taking on habeas corpus, Wal-Mart and Target, not to mention the lies of GW Bush.

Plus of course all the usual suspects in the blogroll.

And if you’re a cat person, head on over to NTodd‘s place; one of his kitties is dying & I think he’d appreciate some well-wishers.