Joe and Hussein are Muslims and Americans

This story is simultaneously sad and funny. A German puts on bad blackface to pretend to be a Somali, to prove Germans are racist. Philipp Lichterbeck, film critic for the Tagesspiegel newspaper, says that Mr Wallraff’s disguise made him look like a clown. The fact that nobody suspected that something was amiss, he says, “does not exactly testify to the worldliness of the Germans”. Akram’s Razor: “Black Like Me” in Germany.

In light of a recent post, I thought it was only fair to point out again that McCain loves dead Americans. He wants to stay 100 years in Iraq, but he doesn’t want you to know about it . Iraq, McCain

by Zoe Pollock Scott Horton interviewed father and son Charles and Gregory Fried about their book, Because It Is Wrong—Torture, Privacy and Presidential Power in the Age of Terror. Horton asked why they paired torture with privacy and surveillance: [After 9/11] the general public, and even the informed public, reacted as if both transgressions were equally serious and equally deserving of condemnation. Indeed, there may have been a markedly greater tolerance of torture than of surveillance—maybe because few of us expect to undergo torture, but all feel our phones or Internet may be tapped into. This gets things exactly wrong.…