Related Posts

Prompting a Tele

It seems that Barack Obama is using a teleprompter. Apparently this is bad because it means he is stooping to GOP levels of having everything scripted for him. You see before, he spoke from conviction and didn’t need to have anything pre-written. At least, I think that’s why it’s bad. I can’t imagine why it would newsworthy otherwise. But Sarah Palin, she swears she doesn’t need a working teleprompter because she know everything. Oh wait, sorry. Republican talking, just invert the story and you’ll get the truth. It’s just like Calvin and Hobbes. Election 2008, McCain, sara

Jesse Ventura on Torture

I’m liking Jesse Ventura more and more. Last week: give me a water board, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I’ll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders This week: “If waterboarding is OK, why don’t we let our police do it to suspects so they can learn what they know?” he asked. “If waterboarding is OK, why didn’t we waterboard [Timothy] McVeigh and Nichols, the Oklahoma City bombers, to find out if there were more people involved? … We only seem to waterboard Muslims… Have we waterboarded anyone else? Name me someone else who has been waterboarded.”

The Long Shadow of Torture (November 4, 2010)

Iranian-American political scientist Darius Rejali is one of the world’s leading experts on torture, and in particular on how democracies change torture and are changed by it. In the wake of Wikileaks revelations about torture in U.S.-occupied Iraq, we explore how his knowledge might deepen our public discourse about such practices and inform our collective reckoning with consequences yet to unfold. [From The Long Shadow of Torture (November 4, 2010)] torture