Prairie Weather

Just fire him if he finds something politically damaging to the US

A lawyer and human rights monitor who published a paper for the UN about US treatment of prisoners in Afghanistan is -- guess what! -- gone.  He was let go a day after the paper was published.  Story here.

Joe Conason on the coverup of Abu Ghraib. No wonder Bush hates lawyers...

The most reliable defenders of American values in this yearlong crisis have been that despised minority known as "the lawyers" -- specifically, those who work at the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Human Rights Watch, the International League for Human Rights, and Human Rights First (formerly known as the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights), along with members of various bar

God the delusion

...You've said that raising children in a religious tradition may even be a form of abuse.

What I think may be abuse is labeling children with religious labels like Catholic child and Muslim child. I find it very odd that in our civilization we're quite happy to speak of a Catholic child that is 4 years old or a Muslim of child that is 4, when these children are much too young to know what they think about the cosmos, life and morality. We wouldn't dream of speaking of a Keynesian child or a Marxist child. And yet, for some reason we make a privileged exception of religion. And, by the way, I think it would also be abuse to talk about an atheist child...

Here's more...

Brother Brad tells all

Noted Berkeley economist looks at Bush plan and comes up with the following:

If you are 45 and if Bush's plan were available today...

Follow George W. Bush's advice, divert $1,000 into your private account, invest it in TIPS, and at the 1.85% per year interest rate you will indeed by able to collect an extra amount worth $10.11 a month in today's dollars when you retire at 65...

But the clawback would reduce your normal Social Security benefit by $14.16 a month. You're $4.05 a month behind. "Building a nest egg." Feh!

Your president only has your best interests at heart.   But there's gotta be a better interest rate than that there's gotta be a better president than that.

Just in time

Discovery of new planet confirmed.

Now we don't have to worry about whether Canada will accept us.

More renditions

This is coming up in tomorrow's (Sunday's) New York Times.  Will it get some attention?  Or are we tuning this stuff out?

Seven months before Sept. 11, 2001, the State Department issued a human rights report on Uzbekistan. It was a litany of horrors.

The police repeatedly tortured prisoners, State Department officials wrote, noting that the most common techniques were "beating, often with blunt weapons, and asphyxiation with a gas mask." Separately, international human rights groups had reported that torture in Uzbek jails included boiling of body parts, using electroshock on genitals and