So it's all the media's fault for distorting Bush's record?

Until the emergence of the netroots, the world was made up for the mainstream media, scared as hell of Bush and toadying his line daily, and Fox and the Wall Street Journal, bought and paid for. Yet Bush won one election by one vote (Anthony Kennedy's) and another by the vote of the Secretary of State of Ohio for no-accountability election software. So obviously, it was the media's distortions and this must be a center-right country.

Then a funny thing happened. People realized they could get their news wherever they wanted: The Daily Show, DailyKos, Huffington Post. And suddenly they started realizing that the distortions were just that, and that the reality was that the people Wingnut worked for had stolen them blind in the name of higher oil prices, lower taxes on the rich and corporate profits at the expense of workers, the environment, retirees and anybody else they could extract more wealth from.

And Barack Obama and the Democrats won a landslide election.

That's what happened. The way the Republicans can get back in power is to stop doing what they did under Bush. And get people to believe in their ability to do so. I'm not holding my breath.

I assume you didn't actually read the article. The point of the article was someone who was actually there testifying that the torture interrogation didn't work and the non-torture interrogation did work. If "what needed to be done" was to get the inteligence, then torture interrogation was not an effective means to that end. So unless you just like to torture, please explain why torture should occur?

Swept under the rug? Google "Citi Field Naming Rights Cost" and you get 80 million hits. There is a difference between "the thing I'd want done with this didn't happen" and "swept under the rug."

Henry II had his legalistic defenses, too.

Oh, right, IOKIYAR

Decided not too long ago by the Washington Supreme Court (Washington being one of the states whose courts turned down an equal protection lawsuit on gay marriage even though it was brought by a high public official who wanted to certify gay marriages). In this case, the birth mother of a child sought to use the old, tired, homophobic common law rules to deny any kind of parental rights to her ex-partner, who had previously raised the child with her as a parent. The court said bullshit, it doesn't work that way.

Al Franken went to Iraq before it was cool.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/SHOWBIZ/01/05/cnna.franken/

If you get sued over suggesting that she shot a man in Reno just to watch him die, you got a lawyer gratis.

It's two blocks east of Harvard Yard, a combination of grad student apartments and faculty houses, and in the summer quite quiet. This occurred just after noon. Not exactly prime burglary time.

So the officer gets called because 'two black males' with 'backpacks' are jiggling with the door. By the time the officer arrives, there's one black male in the house, and you can see what Professor Gates looks like. The man is on the phone, he doesn't run or look in any way out of place. I imagine there are probably pictures on the wall of Professor Gates with people like President Clinton and Nelson Mandela, though I don't know that.

Now how do you, as a Cambridge police officer, presumably familiar with the neighborhood (though apparently not well enough acquainted to know the house is owned by Harvard), approach this man?

I suggest that what you do is say something like, "Hello, sir, sorry for bothering you, but one of the neighbors reported there was a problem involving the door to this house. Do you need any help?" Even if the man is a burglar--and there are zero indications beyond the words of the neighbor to indicate so--who somehow burgles in the middle of a summer afternoon in this quiet, prosperous neighborhood of Cambridge, if you approach him like this, what's he going to do? But to approach him like this is to disarm him in the figurative sense. And when you say, "sir, can I please see your ID so I can write up my report and be on my way?" he's not too likely to fly off the handle. Though he might; Gates had just flown Lord knows how many hours from China and then had a problem getting into his house. But isn't your job as a peace officer to assess the situation you see, not the one that was phoned in?

Or is it in each of my neighbors' power to make a phone call that, without more, entitles the police to make me feel a prisoner in my own home?

I don't think it's crass at all. The question of the cost is not immaterial. This wasn't going to happen in India, it wasn't going to happen in Rwanda. 15 doctors' visits a week? On my own plan, that's $300 a week in copay. Plus, of course the $1 million lifetime limit would have been blown through well before the child was eight. A lot of people have profited from this situation, including many who made the initial decisions here.

The "rant" has been a fixture of "sophisticated" magazines for a long time. Andy Rooney made a career of it, as did E.B. White before him and H.L. Mencken before him, back to Jonathan Swift. I suspect a guy named Adam once wrote, "I am certain I am the most modern guy on earth, so you'd think I'd be interested in this whole 'tree of the knowledge of good and evil' thing, but I'm not."