Could you close that barn door on your way out?

Link:

"My appeal is as follows," Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone said this week during a Vatican Radio broadcast. "Don't read and don't buy 'The Da Vinci Code.' "

[...]

The timing of Bertone's comments, coming nearly two years after the book started flying out of stores everywhere, had a few people scratching their heads. The book has been translated into 44 languages and sold an estimated 20 million copies.

Willful ignorance

Rendition:

At best, the official policy of this administration is to do the rendition and then to be willfilly ignorant about what happens after the suspect is delivered.

My own, more cynical view is that the willful ignorance is a deliberate cover for a policy of sanctioned torture. In other words, the administration knows what is happening, they are satisfied with what is happening, but they will not admit to the policy publicly. They won't admit to it for political and legal reasons.

Propaganda President, revisited

Tom Toles' take on the subject.

Are we ashamed yet?

Link:

At least 26 prisoners have died in American custody in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2002 in what Army and Navy investigators have concluded or suspect were acts of criminal homicide, according to military officials.

That's all you got?

Via the indispensible Juan Cole, this Houston Chronicle story about war-profiteering:

a Pentagon audit report disclosed Monday showed Halliburton subsidiary KBR spent $82,100 to buy liquefied petroleum gas, better-known as LPG, in Kuwait and then 335 times that number to transport the fuel into violence-ridden Iraq.

That's $27.5 million for us laypeople.

And this is the best that the Halliburton flack can come up with:

"The implication is definitely misleading," Hall said. "Transporting fuel into Iraq was a mission fraught with danger, which increased the prices that firms were willing to offer for transportation."

Seems to me that their explanation should be 335 times better than that.

Slice o' life

Here is a nice little slice of life article.

I do some of these things myself; I do not kid myself that these actions make a difference to, for example, Starbucks the corporation. They are for my own satisfaction only.

The Propaganda President

I don't understand why the "Propaganda President" tag isn't more widely used and accepted.

Here is another look at video news releases in the NY Times.

Here is a guy who spends lots of time on this subject.