Defending the liberal tradition in history, science, and philosophy.

Ooops.

Pardon me for misremembering Day’s role. I remembered him being in that ad, and his general anger at Kerry (just like every other Vietnam vet I know), but I should have realized he couldn’t actually have been a member of the Swift Boat Vets for Truth because, duh, he wasn’t even in the Navy. He was just a supporter of the POWs for Truth, a related group.

Most of my other comments stand though.

…from Iraq.

I thought they didn’t have any of that.

Fans of freedom and liberalism rejoice:

American and Iraqi forces are driving Al-Qaeda in Iraq out of its last redoubt in the north of the country in the culmination of one of the most spectacular victories of the war on terror.

Read the rest right here.

The brilliant Penn Jillette makes a living from being a skeptic. Skepticism, he reports in the LA Times, isn’t good enough for the “reality based community,” however — not on matters central to the canon:

[S]omeone asked us about global warming, or climate change, or however they’re branding it now. Teller and I were both silent on stage for a bit too long, and then I said I didn’t know.

I elaborated on “I don’t know” quite a bit. I said that Al Gore was so annoying (that’s scientifically provable, right?) that I really wanted to doubt anything he was hyping, but I just didn’t know. I also emphasized that really smart friends, who knew a lot more than me, were convinced of global warming. I ended my long-winded rambling (I most often have a silent partner) very clearly with “I don’t know.” I did that because … I don’t know. . . .

The next day, I heard that one of the non-famous, non-groovy, non-scientist speakers had used me as an example of someone who let his emotions make him believe things that are wrong. . . . Later, I was asked about a Newsweek blog she wrote. . . .  She ends with: “But here was Penn, a great friend to the skeptic community, basically saying, ‘Don’t bother me with scientific evidence, I’m going to make up my mind about global warming based on my disdain for Al Gore.’ … Which just goes to show, not even the most hard-nosed empiricists and skeptics are immune from the power of emotion to make us believe stupid things.”Is there no ignorance allowed on this one subject? . . . You can’t turn on the TV without seeing someone hating ourselves for what we’ve done to the planet and preaching the end of the world. Maybe they’re right, but is there no room for “maybe”? There’s a lot of evidence, but global warming encompasses a lot of complicated points: Is it happening? Did we cause it? Is it bad? Can we fix it? Is government-forced conservation the only way to fix it? . . .

[T]he climate of the whole world is . . . complicated. I’m not a scientist, and I haven’t spent my life studying weather. I’m trying to learn what I can, and while I’m working on it, isn’t it OK to say “I don’t know”?

Skepticism has been turned on its head; doubt becomes a thought crime. What is it called when that happens, exactly? I have always liked this guy.

I can’t give Jillette all the credit in the world for this thinking, however. His skeptical principles of knowing when not to know only go so far. Perhaps it really does matter whose ox is being Gored, because when it comes to other important matters arguably at least as complicated as global warming, Jillette is bold in his ignorance when in, fact, being so makes him feel good. Read the rest of this entry >>

Hey dude. It wouldn’t matter if he were born in Hawaii or in Indonesia or even somewhere in Africa. If his mother was an American citizen–and I don’t think there’s any doubt she was–then he would be a natural-born citizen and eligible to be President. Which is also an argument for why the “natural born” requirement of the Constitution is archaically silly: someone who was born in Canada of Canadian parents who moved here at the age of 2 or 3 cannot be President (like Michigan’s Governor Granholm), but, someone born outside the United States and who lived outside the U.S. until their 18th birthday could still be President if at least one of their parents was an American citizen.

John McCain was born in Panama, by the way, which was never a state. The fact that Panama was U.S. military territory at the time isn’t actually what makes that irrelevant, either; it’s the fact that both his parents were Americans, so he could easily have been born in Japan, Germany, the UK, Korea, or anywhere else and he’d still be eligible.

This is a non-issue unless you can prove that his mother wasn’t a citizen. Otherwise the only thing they could be “covering up” would be some theoretical event where his parents forged a birth certificate for obscure and basically pointless reasons and Obama’s campaign is still covering it up for no particularly good reason.

Sorry guys, you’re working way too hard on this one. They’re probably “stonewalling” because they have better things to do than conduct an in-depth investigation of 47 year old birth records they probably had to ask his mom for in the first place.

*Update*: Okay, I remain as skeptical about this as I am of those who suggest Dick Cheney shouldn’t have been able to be Vice President because he switched his residency to Wyoming at the last minute in 2000, but, it turns out that the question is more complicated than I thought, and his mom’s being a citizen probably wouldn’t pass muster. I very much doubt that this is going to turn into anything significant, but I would agree: if it’s something Obama didn’t even know about, it would be tragic. It would I suppose be criminal if he did know, but that seems so unlikely it’s ridiculous. It would indicate that he’d been hiding this information his whole life, and his mother and grandparents as well, just because they all thought he might one day run for President–you don’t need to be born in the U.S. to be a Senator or Congressman, let alone an Illinois elected official. Anyway, this all seems so damned unlikely I’m not exactly holding my breath waiting for the “big news” to break.

Armed Liberal has a funny response to Matthew Yglesias, and he asks the rhetorical question, “who would die for the Celtics?”

I can’t restrain myself from answering: “I’m not sure, but some might die for the Lakers.”

(Seriously, I agree with his points, I’m just often surprised at how often people forget the multiple L.A. riots over frickin’ basketball, which seems to be a tradition in that town.)

Historic �Blockbuster� Store Offers Glimpse Of How Movies Were Rented In The Past

God, these folks are at ONN are doing amazingly great work.

Heh.

Bush Tours America To Survey Damage Caused By His Disastrous Presidency

An amazing article about one of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

Dean’s World was added to the Library Of Congress’ archives in 2004 as being “culturally significant” for the 2004 election, in part because of three exclusive and in-depth interviews we published of three of those men. I wish Bud Day had been one of them. You can read the interviews with the three men I did talk to here, here, and here. As a blogger, it’s some of the work I’m proudest of, and I’m often rather perturbed by those who continually insist that these guys were nothing but a Rove/Bush/RNC group of political hacks.

I guess those of us who grew up in families with multiple members of the military, who respect and understand the honor code that unites those who’ve served regardless of their politics, understood intuitively what was not obvious to most others: these guys were for real, and were very seriously angry for reasons that had little to do with politics.

Thanks to commenter Penny Wit, this afternoon I’m reading the Physicians for Human Rights report alleging/documenting torture and abuse by U.S. forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay. I’ll refrain from commenting until I’ve finished at least the Executive Summary, but here’s the links: executive summary and complete report.

*Update* OKay, I’ve finished the executive summary. I’m not sure if I need to read the entirety of the rest of the report, though I’ve scanned it. I find the report credible, although I find that the preface by General Taguba seems to contain a few non-sequiturs. I also would endorse most but not quite all of the report’s recommendations. For example, the report recommends an absolute ban on waterboarding, while admitting that no one they evaluated had been waterboarded, and what we do know about the rare use of that procedure is not really consistent with anything I have found in that report. If anything, it only strengthens my own feeling that waterboarding, used under the proper professional and highly limited circumstances, is vastly superior to anything reported by these physicians, for it is nowhere near as harmful and has, unlike anything reported here, been proven to work in limited circumstances to save lives without hurting people.

The report also leaves several important questions, such as which of these activities was authorized and which was as a result of negligence and incompetence in either field or executive command. Such questions would probably be beyond the scope of the physicians’ task here, which was to document mistreatment. This they have done quite ably. The report should be read by just about anyone with an interest in this subject, particularly in any command capacity; like the abuses at Abu Ghraib which are well known, much here is inexcusable.

(Thanks to commenter Penny Wit for the link to the report and summary.)

One of the most complex and polarizing figures in the U.S. Senate’s history has died.

So what are you up to this weekend? And, ya got any links?

By the way, this is the new Weekend Open Thread, which may be bumped throughout the weekend so there will be only one.