Jobless [chat]

in which mike still has not found a real job. At least Death Race opens this week.

Obama / Biden 08

Obama chooses Biden as running mate

WOTLK Cinematic Trailer

Wratch of the Lich King Cinematic Trailer

Fuck
Yes

Is this poor man a Sith?

McCain was not Tortured.

This is something which merits attention:

In all the discussion of John McCain's recently recovered memory of a religious epiphany in Vietnam, one thing has been missing. The torture that was deployed against McCain emerges in all the various accounts. It involved sleep deprivation, the withholding of medical treatment, stress positions, long-time standing, and beating. Sound familiar?

According to the Bush administration's definition of torture, McCain was therefore not tortured.

Cheney denies that McCain was tortured; as does Bush. So do John Yoo and David Addington and George Tenet. In the one indisputably authentic version of the story of a Vietnamese guard showing compassion, McCain talks of the agony of long-time standing. A quarter century later, Don Rumsfeld was putting his signature to memos lengthening the agony of "long-time standing" that victims of Bush's torture regime would have to endure. These torture techniques are, according to the president of the United States, merely "enhanced interrogation."

No war crimes were committed against McCain. And the techniques used are, according to the president, tools to extract accurate information. And so the false confessions that McCain was forced to make were, according to the logic of the Bush administration, as accurate as the "intelligence" we have procured from "interrogating" terror suspects. Feel safer?

Zero Punctuation: Soul Calibur IV

Rachel Maddow gets own MSNBC show

Starting September 8 Rachel Maddow will begin hosting her own show on MSNBC. Keith Olbermann made it official with a post in his diary at Daily Kos.

This is super awesome! I loved listening to her radio show when I could get Air America when I lived in Iowa City, and having her be apart of MSNBC's election coverage has been great. She has been very good at cutting through a lot of the bullshit. And her battles-slash-lovefests with Pat Buchanan were epic.

There is no format set, at least according to Olbermann's post. I really hope they break away from partisan-hackery of Glenn Beck or Bill-o. MSNBC has Hardball for that sort of bullshit. Indeed I think her show should be issue focused, not talking-head focused. She has always been very good at digging into specific issues. Give her and her guests space to get inside and explore a single topic without the pressure of a 5 minute segment.

Oh, and MSNBC is bias and full of liberals who hate America and the American Way of Life.