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.

McCain Staffer on Dungeons & Dragons

Per Michael Goldfarb at his Johnmccain.com blog:

It may be typical of the pro-Obama Dungeons & Dragons crowd to disparage a fellow countryman's memory of war from the comfort of mom's basement, but most Americans have the humility and gratitude to respect and learn from the memories of men who suffered on behalf of others. John McCain has often said he witnessed a thousand acts of bravery while he was imprisoned, and though not every one has been submitted into the public record, they are remembered by the men who were there (one such only recently reported by Karl Rove though it escaped mention in any of Senator McCain's books). But as Swindle said, this is a "desperate group of people trying to make something out of nothing."

A Tubular Boobular Joy

Trying to think of the best way to describe Grad School...I think MST3K already formulated the most precise description:

Daily Show / Colbert Viewers are Fucking Smart

The good people at Pew just released their yearly survey of how people consume news.

Once again, people who watch Daily Show and the Colbert Report are way smarter and much better informed.

The Colbert Report and The Daily Show are notable for having relatively well-informed audiences that are younger than the national average: 34% of regular Colbert viewers answered the three political knowledge questions correctly, as did 30% of regular Daily Show viewers. Less than a quarter of either audience is older than 50 (22% Colbert, 23% Daily Show), compared with 41% of the general public.

I am about half way through the report, but it is a good read.