Well I'm back after a break for a beach vacation in FL. Yeah! I wasn't on a total news blackout, but it felt like it. Its strange not to be surfing the web and having news come at you all day every day. I need to make a concerted effort to be more diligent about controlling the amount of time I spend on being a news junkie and internet addict. Ugh.
That said here are the top links I've read today, some about things I didn't hear much about last week.
(1) The Yoo memos: There was an excerpt in the Trib today about evilness (my summary) of John Yoo and his ideas that all bets are off wrt Torture if President Bush wants to be in a perpetual state of war. If I was a student on his campus I would protest all of his classes at Berkeley.
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/04/the-guilty-men.html
(fortunately for me, but not him, AS was not blogging much last week either!)
plus http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/04/yoo_i_thought_torture_was_a_ba.php
http://harpers.org/archive/2008/04/hbc-90002785
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/2008/04/memo_justified_warrantless_sur.php
http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/convictions/archive/2008/04/01/yoo-s-utter-glib-certainty.aspx
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/05/guantanamo200805?currentPage=1
looks like a must read
(2) http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/04/worse-case.html
ooh - a great quote, from 1954:
"There is something about this quest for absolute security that is self-defeating. It is an exercise which, like every form of perfectionism, undermines and destroys its own basic purpose. The French have their wonderful proverb: Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien--the absolute best is the enemy of the good. Nothing truer has ever been said . A foreign policy aimed at the achievement of total security is the one thing I can think of that is entirely capable of bringing this country to a point where it will have no security at all. And a ruthless, reckless insistence on attempting to stamp out everything that could conceivably constitute a reflection of improper foreign influence in our national life, regardless of the actual damage it is doing to the cost of eliminating it, in terms of other American values, is the one thing I can think of that should reduce us all to a point where the very independence we are seeking to defend would be meaningless, for we would be doing things to ourselves as vicious and tyrannical as any that might be brought to us from outside.
" -George F. Kennan's 1954 The Illusion of Security
(3) http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/04/by-patrick-toda.html
MLK Letter from Birmingham jail excerpt - more to come about our detour stop in Montgomery AL...
(4) and speaking of Alabama....Siegelman released!
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/03/siegelman_released_from_prison.php
I actually saw the headline in the paper WHILE I was checking into a hotel in Montgomery. Just a litte factoid... the Dexter Ave Baptist church where MLK preached is less than 2 blocks from the AL statehouse... Its on the same street! -in view of each other. More on this later once I get my pictures uploaded. Anyway it just struck me as a personal coincidence that this happened while I was there - in the town of the scene of the crime, so to speak.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSeL9Pkmt2M
Wow and I thought IL & Chicago politics took the cake.
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