Le Tigre — they weren’t on hiatus? — writes a clever multi-parodic song for Christina Aguilera. Is this like when Michael Jackson started hiring R. Kelly for Invincible? Or like when a few years later everyone rediscovered the genius of the pre-Dangerous Michael? I am too tired to care. All I know is it makes [...]

I know, right? How often does that happen? Well, believe it or not, Rep. Rush Holt, who’s been pushing the Pentagon to order the videotaping of military interrogations for at least the two years that I’ve been covering Holt’s effort, won. It looks like interrogation out in the battlefield won’t be covered, and the whole question [...]

Roger Cohen has a touching column today about a guy named David Khoury, who moved to the West Bank to open a microbrewery. I asked Khoury what he would say to an Israeli general if he had the chance. “I would tell him that Israel is a reality and the Palestinian people are ready to [...]

I interrupt an hours’ worth of back-n-forth on Peter Beinart’s piece about the decline of American liberal Zionism to highlight something I suspect all sides of the debate will agree with: granting Israel American statehood is an idea so bad it’s goofy. The guy who penned this impressively interminable proposal swears in his comments that [...]

I confess to never having heard of Journeyman Pictures before today, but this video report from Kandahar about the rise of CIA/Special Forces-backed militias in and around Ahmed Wali Karzai is powerful. (Sadly, I can’t seem to embed it, so I’ll have to ask you to click through.) It’s not powerful because it indicts the [...]

In the course of Adam Serwer’s post about an odd conservative claim for a constitutional distinction between torture-for-punishment and prisoner abuse, Adam introduces me to a quote I hadn’t seen from Justice Scalia: “Has anyone ever referred to torture as punishment? I don’t think so,” Scalia said. “What’s he punishing you for? He’s trying to [...]

If you’re going through some adversity at the moment, remember that determination, focus and a realistic assessment of your situation will see you through it. Perhaps more suited to this particular example: it may be the case that lames who aren’t on your level have the upper hand at the moment. But nothing is over. [...]

That’s what’s looking like the Army is treating a brigade of Oregon National Guardsmen like at Lewis-McChord out in Washington state. Sen. Wyden and Rep. Schrader are trying to get the Army to launch an investigation. Read all about it.

From 9:30 a.m. until 3:45 p.m. on Wednesday, the Brookings Institution will gather together representatives from five militaries that now allow open gay service to present instructive lessons for the U.S. military. They’ll say — I venture to suppose — that they didn’t lose any martial skill by broadening their recruitment to a larger population [...]

IMMEDIATE RELEASE No. 402-10 May 17, 2010 DOD Identifies Navy Casualty The Department of Defense announced today the death of a sailor who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom. Petty Officer Zarian Wood, 29, of Houston, Texas, died May 16 in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, of wounds sustained from an improvised explosive device blast while on dismounted [...]