There was talk this morning that Bush only hit Afghanistan to delay his announced arrival in India, as large protests had been organized at his arrival site. I can't really imagine Afghanistan is something he wants to remind us about: bin Laden is still at large, the drug trade is running rampant (a hit of heroin is now apparently less than a movie rental at Blockbuster), the warlords are essentially back in power, and "insurgents" have killed hundreds in the past year. Maybe he should have stopped in Dubai.

Was this in response to questions from the Congress? The biggest questions I'm left with are: (1) why did he write this letter at all, and (2) why did he include those points that are so obviously damning? Let's hope the administration keeps "clarifying" things, because they only seem to dig themselves deeper every time.

If any of you have the chance, I have to highly recommend the stage version of "Guantanamo", which is essentially the story of the "Kingston Three". While certainly left-leaning, what really struck me was how powerful the voices of the Guantanamo prisoners and their families were, as the play essentially just recreates real-life interviews.

While many prisoners will claim innocence, the voices of Guantanamo are not the "I didn't do it" cries of Cops "guest stars" or Judge Judy defendants. Their stories are so complex and different, and yet share such a clear common thread, that they ring with an unmistakable truth. They paint the picture of a U.S. Government that desperately profiled and sought out easy targets and rounded them up to claim that it was somehow holding terrorists accountable. In our own grief and outrage, we were too ready to accept it, believing that these arab faces were the enemies our leaders claimed they were. When it became clear that many of them were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time (even when our government manufactured both the place and the time), the people who might be held accountable for those mistakes simply began to manufacture stories of guilt. When those stories were questioned, they silenced the questioners, and when the law swung against them, they changed the laws.

Guantanamo isn't a necessary evil; it's simply an evil. The only thing worse than our acceptance of it is that our supposedly christian leadership, while spitting "culture of life" out of one side of it's mouth, damns innocent people out of the other side.

Of course all of the exaggerations of the death toll have been on one side. If it was really 400 and the media said 50, that wouldn't be an exaggeration.

I've worked with too many corporations who spent all of their time and resources trying to control and spin bad news instead of actually trying to improve the situation, and I've never seen it work in the long term. Is it too much to ask that Rumsfeld and Rice get off the Sunday talk circuit, quit telling us how great things are going, and actually get back to doing their jobs?

Someone showed me a video recently of a very interesting "interview". Someone asked a bunch of people at an anti-abortion rally two questions (and in a fairly open, non-threatening manner, IMO): (1) Do you think abortion should be illegal?, and (2) If so, what should the penalty be for women who have abortions?

Of course, in this group, everyone answered "illegal", but no one in the taped interview was willing to answer (2). Now, a couple of people were just evasive, saying things like "I'm not a lawyer". Shockingly, though, many flat out admitted that they had never thought about it. They were sure enough about illegalization to be holding pictures of aborted fetuses in a parking lot and shouting at passers-by, but they had no idea what the criminal penalty should be. One woman even said "it's between that woman and God". If it's between the woman making the choice and God, why does it have to be illegal? The interviewer flat out asked as much, and she had no answer.

I'd really like to see NARAL or another group ask this question to pro-life members of Congress. I think most of them are smart enough to have thought about it, but it would put them in a very uncomfortable position, and it's a fair and important question. Ultimately, it's also the nature of my personal pro-choice stance. I can understand those who sincerely, morally believe abortion is wrong, but I think many of them fail to consider the moral consequences of illegalization.

If you want to use the word "life" very broadly, then you've got to include in that prohibition virtually every animal, which are unquestionably alive and most of which feel pain in one form or another. Some studies suggest that even plants feel pain. Ok, granted, those studies are probably in the Swedish Journal of Paranormal Botany, but I'm sure I could produce a published study.

It's still amazing to me what the "culture of life" seems to include:

Zygotes: Yes

Prisoners: No

Poor people: No, unless they vote for you

Arabs: No, unless they're from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait or the UAE

According to the news release, Norton is making the move to the private sector. I'm guessing either lobbyist for Exxon or head of the lumberjack's union (no offense to you lumberjacks out there).

Ok, I finally got around to watching the finale on TiVo. Wow. The big points have all been made, but something small really caught my attention. Admiral Adama's moustache and Apollo's few extra points were great bits of detail and just showed again how well this show is constructed. It took me a bit to realize why else they struck me, though. They were such clear yet subtle physical signs of the two men's lapse of vigilance. Their guard was down, and those small signs caused an almost subconscious foreboding, just two more indications that something was going to go desperately wrong. Kudos to the BG team for not skimping on effort and detail.