Whoa, Obama is acting like a bully! Look how he pushed Stephen Colbert off the ballot in SC:

Obama supporters pressed officials to keep Colbert off ballot

COLUMBIA, South Carolina (CNN) -- Two prominent supporters of Illinois Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign in South Carolina called state Democratic Party officials and urged them to keep funnyman Stephen Colbert's name off the primary ballot, according to party officials and Obama supporters.

In Hillary Slams "Socialized Medicine" attack, The Silence applauds Hillary Clinton's response to someone "accusing" her of supporting socialized medicine.

Clinton's response is full of distortions, many of which perpetuate frames that hurt progressives and help conservatives.

What kind of slick trick is this:

"Do you think Medicare is socialized medicine?" she challenged him. "To a degree it is," Ashanti said. "Well, then you are in a small minority in America because Medicare has literally saved the lives and saved the resources of countless generations of seniors in our country."

An actual hopeful sign? Hopeful for anyone who's not a US soldier stationed in Iraq or a Republican politician, perhaps. Hopeful for Iraqis, for Turkmens, for Kurds, for Iranians, maybe.

I'm talking abou the creation of a multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian political party in Iraq by Ibrahim Jaafri.

I am amazed and appalled at how people continue to write about waterboarding. Here's Deb Riechmann writing for AP today:

The United States has been criticized by European allies and others around the world over interrogation techniques such as "waterboarding," in which prisoners are strapped to a plank over water and are made to fear that they may be drowned.

This is unspeakable. The author is torturing the truth in such a way as to enable the torturing of people.

Nasty details below the fold, if you've got the stomach for such things.

Look, everyone knows Iraq is falling apart and everyone knows we can't stop it. For those of us lucky enough to have been opposed to the war all along, this isn't a problem. But what do you do if you're a pundit who's backed the war all along? How do you jump off the stagecoach before it runs off the cliff without admitting that you were helping to steer it?

How can you protect the shreds of your reputation? Whatever robe you throw over your nakedness, I'd suggest it contain at least 30% Kevlar.

We tend to believe in inertia. Things went great for us--really, really great, like it has never gone for any society in the history of the world--for the last couple of centuries. But there were reasons for that, reasons that are limited in scope and may soon no longer apply. We naturally think the reason things went so great is because of us. (And here by "us" I mean some mishmosh of Western Civ, technological society, capitalism, etc., that may apply in some senses to Malaysia as well as to the US or France).

But the reasons things went so great include:

1. The relatively easy theft of resources from around the globe due to the fact that we burst out of Europe with very superior technology for organization, transport, and warfare. Sure, Britain got bogged down in Afghanistan, but India paid off very handsomely. The numerous genocides in North America were very rewarding, as well. This sort of opportunity is much more complex, more difficult, and more rare nowadays.

I know, you all know this, but we now commonly talk about it like there is such a thing, so I thought it was important to remind you:

There is no war on terror.

You knew this when Bush first started saying it. You laughed about it. You said things like, "What next, a war on flanking maneuvers? A war on strategic withdrawal?"

Kidneystones has a diary excoriating John Derbyshire for an aricle in the National Review Online called RIP: Immigration Bill Autopsy. Kidneystones focuses on the latter part of the article, where Derbyshire attempts to make the point that Hispanic immigration is bad for African Americans because... well, it gets a little weird.

Kidneystones' thesis is that Derbyshire is a traditional anti-black racist. But I don't think that's quite fair. The real answer is more interesting, more twisted, and more psychological.

Another American has a well-researched diary with a poll, asking whether we think Palestinians, Israelis, or both have a right to a state of their own.

This dialog disturbs me, and I thought I'd write about it until I understood why. :-)

The crux of the issue is, what does the word "right" mean in this context?

I think it's had some very positive effects.

Okay, there's the whole loot-the-treasury thing, and the absurd-war-on-terror thing, and the suppress-science thing, and the defile-the-constitution thing, and the rape-the-environment thing. But let's look at our chances of getting someone into office who might actually address some of those issues--who might be more capable of doing so, and more likely to do so, than Gore 43 might have been.

One, I think his disappointing failure to fight tooth-and-nail has been at least somewhat helpful. Somehow, and contrary to my own personal opinion, it seems to have made people respect him.