I think it was in The Black Cat that Boris Karloff's character gleefully screamed, "Torture! Torture!" while tormenting old foe Bela Lugosi and two hapless travelers in his futuristic Deco mansion.

Alan Dershowitz might have offered Karloff a warrant:

To Torture or Not to Torture

(Dershowitz) accepted — and more important, said most Americans accepted — the fact that there might be times when torture was a legitimate tool of interrogation. At the same time, as a seasoned defense attorney, he was all too aware of the danger of police abuse; he didn’t want to give governments — perhaps this government in particular — a blank check. So he came up with the concept of torture warrants, which would work much the way search warrants do now, requiring judicial oversight. Torture would be allowed, but brought within the confines of the legal system. The idea seemed outlandish in 2002. Maybe today, when torture is no longer the abstract issue it seemed to be six years ago, many of his readers will find it less outlandish.


Even those who believe in an absolute prohibition against torture would be well advised to ponder the legal paradigm shift that Dershowitz says has occurred and that so worries him. If torture is inevitably going to take place in a preventive state, should we be content to allow it to exist outside the law? At the end of his new book, Dershowitz warns: “We need to develop a jurisprudence for the emerging preventive state. … Black holes in the law are anathema to democracy, accountability, human rights and the rule of law.”

Dershowitz's inevitability argument raises interesting questions:

Since it will occur anyway, should we have warrants for murder-for-hire? (One could argue that we already do)

Since it will occur anyway, should we have warrants for organ harvesting?

Since it will occur anyway, should we have warrants for child pornography?


Cross-posted from TMCPAC

To pass the time while driving, my daughter and I like to torment my wife, Angela, with our off-the-wall interpretations of billboards. For several years we have joked that AIG stands for, "Angie's Insurance Group." Until yesterday, AIG, actually the American Insurance Group, seemed as doomed as Lehman Brothers, but the government stepped in to bail them out. But why was AIG saved?

Peak Oil maven Matt Savinar suggests that AIG was bailed out to protect it's covert operations. Savinar coyly says he can't tell us everything, but does cite this 2000 LA Times article:

The Secret (Insurance) Agent Men

    They knew which factories to burn, which bridges to blow up, which cargo ships could be sunk in good conscience. They had pothole counts for roads used for invasion and head counts for city blocks marked for incineration.

    They weren’t just secret agents. They were secret insurance agents. These undercover underwriters gave their World War II spymasters access to a global industry that both bankrolled and, ultimately, helped bring down Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.


...

    Starr had started out selling insurance to Chinese in Shanghai in 1919 and, over the next 50 years, would build what is now American International Group, one of the biggest insurance companies in the world. He was forced to move his operation to New York in 1939, when Japan invaded China.


...

    Starr sent insurance agents into Asia and Europe even before the bombs stopped falling and built what eventually became AIG, which today has its world headquarters in the same downtown New York building where the tiny OSS unit toiled in the deepest secrecy.

    Starr died in 1968, but his empire endures. AIG is the biggest foreign insurance company in Japan. More than a third of its $40 billion in revenue last year came from the Far East theater that Starr helped carpet bomb and liberate.

cross-posted at TCMPAC

Washington Post
A NATION OF EXAGGERATORS
Quit Doling Out That Bad-Economy Line
   
By Donald Luskin
Sunday, September 14, 2008; Page B01

... Things today just aren't that bad. Sure, there are trouble spots in the economy, as the government takeover of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and jitters about Wall Street firm Lehman Brothers, amply demonstrate. And unemployment figures are up a bit, too. None of this, however, is cause for depression -- or exaggerated Depression comparisons.

Talk about getting it wrong. This guy must be reading Clever's blog - and believing it.

Full disclosure: I'm an adviser to John McCain's campaign, though as far as I know, the senator has never taken one word of my advice.

Oh, that explains it.

China Rises: Notes from the Middle Kingdom is a blog by Tim Johnson, the Beijing bureau chief for McClatchy Newspapers.

McCain and Obama on China

This is a rather lengthy post with two parts. The first part is a Reuters synopsis of a report from the Asia Foundation about the policies, in very broad strokes, of John McCain and Barack Obama toward Asia. I’ve edited down sections on Pakistan and India but left in anything pertinent to China. This information is gleaned largely from speeches, campaign websites and party platforms.

The second part includes essays written by McCain and Obama (or top aides) for the American Chamber of Commerce in China’s monthly magazine. These essays, released this morning, have a lot of boilerplate in them. I was going to edit down but decided just to boldface the key policy points that differentiate the candidates.

One side note to all this, while much of the world is mesmerized by the U.S. election, hoping for a significant shift in U.S. policies, China remains wary of a post-Bush era with evident nostalgia for the presidencies both of George H.W. Bush (1989-1993) and George W. Bush (2001-2009). Father and son are seen as FOC (friends of China), reliable for their pro-business push and willingness to cut China slack on many issues. There’s some trepidation in China about what lies ahead.

Jim Kunstler

It turns out the real hurricane blew through Wall Street last week, not Galveston. This morning, Manhattan is strewn chest-deep with the debris of banking and at this hour (seven a.m.) nobody knows how far, deep, and wide the damage will spread. The fear, of course, is that we are witnessing a classic "house-of-cards" or "dominos-in-a-row," situation, and that the death of Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch will cascade into a generalized collapse of the entire consensus of value that supports mediums of exchange.

At least one thing ought to be clear: this has happened due to the negligence and misfeasance of the regulating authorities, namely the Republican Party, and that now all the hoopla surrounding Sarah Palin can be swept away revealing that group to be what they actually are: the party that wrecked America. I hope one or two Barack Obama campaign officials are reading this blog. You must commence the re-branding of the opposition right now. The Republicans must be clearly identified as, the party that wrecked America.

On Face the Nation this morning, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Janet Napolitano, Jane Swift, and Kay Bailey Hutchison debated the merits of a VP nominee that clearly couldn't hold a candle to any one of them. Schultz in particular was relentless, noting that Palin, "doesn't know anything." and, "has cliff-noted her performance."

Women and the Vote 8 minutes

Full show 22 minutes