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Prisoner Treatment, Morality, and #Torture

Juan Cole is brilliant in his analysis of how the US lost the moral high ground on prisoner treatment, in part because of our torture polices. But I fear that the argument that the public humiliation of prisoners is against international law won’t take the US very far after 8 years of Bush-Cheney. After the evidence surfaced that the US military took all those humiliating pictures of prisoners at Abu Ghraib to blackmail them by threatening to make them public, the US assertion of support for this principle of the Geneva Conventions will be met with, well, let us say…

Rent Affordability on Minimum Wage – NYTimes.com

Rent Affordability on Minimum Wage – NYTimes.com. But even if you quibble with how exactly the Coalition put the chart together, it’s clear that there’s a mismatch between the minimum wage and the cost of living (or at least a decent cost of living). In New York, which is in the midst of a fight over raising the minimum wage, two individuals would need to work 68 hours a week each to manage the rent on a two-bedroom unit. If they have kids, the 70 percent of their paychecks left after rent won’t get them very far.

A Terror Trials Pep Talk

There are two reasons I am utterly baffled by the possible reversal of the decision to try terrorists in federal court. First, it comes at a time when efforts to find, kill, and capture terrorists are having significant success. The key, it turns out, is to be dogged and professional, rather than going to “the dark side.” And that’s the other puzzling thing — that arguments based on fear-mongering and emphasizing the appearance of toughness still carry weight long after they were shown to do more harm than good. … We’ve got this totally backwards; this is a chance for…