Various issues

I don't have time to write full posts at the moment, but here are some things that have been on my mind.

• Jon Swift's defense of Joe Lieberman's refusal to cut and run from the senate race after losing the primary is nearly perfect. "Without Joe Lieberman for Republicans to support, all that will be left in Washington is partisan rancor."
• People's faith in religious authority seems to be increasing: religious fraud is growing rapidly. "Often, perpetrators are so successful building an image as good Christians that churchgoers won't cooperate with law enforcement authorities even after the crime is revealed." Bizarrely, the article notes that "Money has a way of blinding objectivity, even for we who are believers" instead of noting that "belief has a way of blinding objectivity, even for those whose money is at stake."
• In the wake of the Hamdan decision, it appears that many of the administration's interrogation techniques violate the War Crimes Act. Rather than change the techniques, the administration wants to change the act (which was entirely uncontroversial just ten years ago when it passed almost unanimously in the Republican Congress). Bush has successfully focused the debate on "Humiliating and Degrading Treatment," but that's just a smokescreen; the real issue is whether "cruel treatment" will be allowed.
• Onegoodmove has a terrific Daily Show clip on the propaganda we've all been drinking in lately.
• The world apparently lacks the resources to feed 800,000,000 people, but has the resources to
• overfeed a billion people
• . Something is wrong with that.
• Good Math, Bad Math has a fascinating history of π and a few strange examples of where it shows up.
• This award-winning video clip of famous images mutating is worth seeing. The effort that must have gone into it is hard to imagine.
• Crooks and Liars has Keith Olbermann's list of suspiciously-timed terror warnings (quicktime or windows media). On the one hand, there's so much bad news for Bush these days that most days that they could have announced something would have coincided with some politically sensitive issue. On the other hand, most of the terror warnings weren't very credible. Make up your own mind.
• The Anonymous Liberal has a very important post about partisanship under Bush and what sane people are forced to do these days. It's very sobering.
  Also, if anyone knows anything about connecting Sprint phones to Apple computers, please let me know. As far as I can tell, none of the brands Sprint works with can connect via iSync, and DataPilot looks pretty crappy. Does anyone know of a workaround I can use and/or if it's worth a hundred bucks to upgrade to a phone with a memory card?

Tags: bush, christian, cia, corruption, dave, dems, disenchantedidealist, election, linkdump, military, movie, propaganda, satire, scam, terror, torture