Public service announcement: City of God comes out on DVD tomorrow. It is so very good. Big-time recommended.

Juan Cole has an excellent essay on Sistani’s view of the ideal Iraqi government. Since Sistani more or less got his way with yesterday’s UN resolution, it’s worth reading.

Eric Muller may have somehow gotten his hands on the first 56 pages of the March 6th, 2003 memo on torture. I haven’t read it yet. Note that there’s no pedigree attached, so it should be considered suspect until and unless more evidence rolls in. Update: MSNBC has the same thing. Except not exactly the same; it’s a different scan. The PDF MSNBC has looks like a photocopy of the version that was scanned to create Eric Muller’s PDF. Someone’s leaking those 56 pages all over the place.

One liner framework for an Adventure game: “Huey Long’s Men of Action!”

The working-group report elaborated the Bush administration’s view that the president has virtually unlimited power to wage war as he sees fit, and neither Congress, the courts nor international law can interfere. It concluded that neither the president nor anyone following his instructions was bound by the federal Torture Statute, which makes it a crime for Americans working for the government overseas to commit or attempt torture, defined as any act intended to “inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering.” Punishment is up to 20 years imprisonment, or a death sentence or life imprisonment if the victim dies. ...

I’m normally not much of a Harry Turtledove fan. I found the Worldwar series to be incredibly long and dull with poor characterization and fairly uninteresting aliens. He clearly knows his history, but he wasn’t so good at getting the story across. For some reason I took a plunge on American Front anyhow. Surprise, it was remarkably readable. I think this is perhaps because there’s a whole lot of populism in it, and I’m a sucker for populism at the moment. So I went ahead and read the whole trilogy, and then the second trilogy set in the same timeline, and now I’m waiting for the next one. ...

Since I posted my pieces on the upcoming draft and Congress.org, I’ve gotten 687 hits on the first and 493 on the second. Total traffic: 1180 hits, most of which is probably not everyday visitors who saw it on the front page anyhow. Over half of those came within the first couple of days; the counter-meme spread very nicely within LiveJournal. These days I’m getting hits from message boards of various stripes. I got few links from blogs outside LiveJournal, interestingly. I think it’s because the original rumor didn’t spread much in the blogosphere.

The only thing I really don’t like about MT-Blacklist is that I have to fiddle around and cut and paste URLs and click a lot when I want to mark a comment as spam. This is mostly my own fault for using an old CRT-based mail reader, but still. So I wrote a little script that takes an MovableType comment email as input and runs MT-Blacklist on the comment. Now, whenever I get comment spam, I pipe the email alert to this script and the comment spam goes away. This works for me. It may not work for you. No warrantee, etc. Test before using. Requires the CPAN modules WWW::Mechanize and HTML::TokeParser.

George Tenet resigned yesterday. This is kind of odd for a number of reasons. First, some background: George Tenet is not exactly a friend of Bush. The split has been fairly clear since Tenet left Bush out in the cold (original) on the “imminent threat” question. There’s also been plenty of speculation that the CIA is not pleased with the Bush administration about the Valerie Plame issue. The popular conception among Washington-watchers is that CIA and State are more or less aligned in an effort to blunt the impact of neocon foreign policy (original). Doug Feith’s Office of Special Plans (original) was a successful attempt to create an alternative channel by which intelligence on Iraq could reach the President. ...

The Sons of Sam Horn board is still struggling with the price of celebrity. The Hartford Courant ombudsman, Karen Hunter, more or less apologized for that Jeff Jacobs column. She also said — I think accurately — that journalistic ethics don’t go away just because you’re in an anonymous chat room. It’s a good, balanced column that shows a decent understanding of the issues involved. That one goes in the positives column for the SoSH crowd. ...