What I’m Reading Today
- It’s hard to argue that Ms. Barreiro was forced into bankruptcy by crazed subprime mortgage lenders in 1998. Greedy bankers certainly didn’t keep her and her first husband from paying their taxes. Megan McArdle
- Obama did not shut down the practice of torture, Nairn observes, but “merely repositioned it,” restoring it to the American norm, a matter of indifference to the victims. “[H]is is a return to the status quo ante,” writes Nairn, “the torture regime of Ford through Clinton, which, year by year, often produced more U.S.-backed strapped-down agony than was produced during the Bush/Cheney years.” Noam Chomsky
- If there were any doubts about the once-mighty party’s hilarious new role in American society, they vanished in recent weeks, as the Republican leadership’s attempt to stop the passage of Barack Obama’s budget turned into one of the most half-assed public-relations campaigns in congressional history. Matt Taibbi
- They were aided by testimony from Ray Bohlin, a molecular biologist who left science to start a fundamentalist ministry, and Don Patton, who parades a doctorate from what appears to be an Australian diploma mill and gained notoriety claiming fossil evidence that dinosaurs and humans walked side-by-side. Seed
