Hi dickday - nice to meet you too. I usually just leave comments. Decided to step up the plate more. What the heck.

Assuming adherence to the strict limitations discussed herein, including the careful medical monitoring and available intervention by the team as necessary, we conclude that although the question is substantial and difficult, the authorized use of the waterboard by adequately trained interrogators and other team member could not reasonably be considered specifically intended to cause severe physical or mental pain or suffering and thus would not violate sections 2340-2340A.

Um, isn't the whole point of a mock execution to cause severe mental pain and suffering? It certainly got Dostoyevsky's attention and altered his mind. Why go to extraordinary lengths to scare the shit out of people - it's intended to induce terror and helplessness, to get them to divulge everything they know. The point of the exercise isn't in doubt nor does Bradbury attempt to hide it. These memos are frighteningly shabby attempts to excuse away barbaric behavior and give legal cover to the blatantly illegal. Banality of evil indeed. And isn't the "reasonably" just odious? Whatever law school this asshole graduated from should be shut down.

What kind of medical professional gets involved with torturing people? Presumably military medical folks, but who knows. Not America's finest hour.

I'm liking this, though we'll have to wait and see exactly what they release. The silence in regards to the conduct of Justice employees - in contrast to CIA employees - cannot be very edifying for Bybee, Yoo and co.

Ice bridge holding Antarctic ice shelf cracks up
Mon Apr 6, 8:53 am ET
OSLO (Reuters) – An ice bridge which had apparently held a vast Antarctic ice shelf in place during recorded history shattered on Saturday and could herald a wider collapse linked to global warming, a leading scientist said.
"It's amazing how the ice has ruptured. Two days ago it was intact," David Vaughan, a glaciologist with the British Antarctic Survey, told Reuters of a satellite image of the Wilkins Ice Shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula.
The satellite picture, from the European Space Agency (ESA), showed that a 40 km (25 mile) long strip of ice believed to pin the Wilkins Ice Shelf in place had splintered at its narrowest point, about 500 meters wide.
"We've waited a long time to see this," he said.
The Wilkins, now the size of Jamaica or the U.S. state of Connecticut, is one of 10 shelves to have shrunk or collapsed in recent years on the Antarctic Peninsula, where temperatures have risen in recent decades apparently because of global warming.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090406/sc_nm/us_antarctica_ice_1

You're kidding right? The obvious next step is that House GOP staffers track down some wingnut ex-student of Reilly's who's willing to make some kind of outrageously fictitious charge about him - say, he advocates implementing Sharia law in Massachusetts - and then they proceed to repeat the outrageous lies again and again on Fox. After a week of this, John King does a 30 minute special on the suspected links between Islamic extremism and global warming. Shortly thereafter David Broder bemoans the partisan nature of of MIT professors and wonders why the Obama administration can't find nicer people to advocate their policies.

Maybe it's just my imagination.

BTW: anybody else see wingnut musical drama fanboy Mark Steyn's blithely racist take on the Limbaugh/Steele smackdown?
Fun stuff:

In two brief soundbites, Mr. Steele has managed to suggest to his own party base that he has a lazy disposition that reflexively shares the liberal biases, and to allow the wider world to portray him as a craven squish. This is not encouraging. At the very minimum, he does not appear ready for primetime.

Nice. I'm betting Rush was careful to not say anything about Steele that could have opened him to charges of racism. He-Man Steyn wants to go one better than Rush though, says what the hell, and and gleefully unloads with "who's idea was it to allow this lazy negro closet liberal (and maybe a closet "squish" too!) to take charge of our glorious party?" Now that's some hard-chargin' conservatism we all can believe in.

Armed with statistics from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climate Data Center, D’Aleo reported in the 2009 Old Farmer’s Almanac that the U.S. annual mean temperature has fluctuated for decades and has only risen 0.21 degrees since 1930 — which he says is caused by fluctuating solar activity levels and ocean temperatures, not carbon emissions.

The OFA, famous for its peer-reviewed articles on how best to keep maple syrup from migrating across the breakfast plate from pancake to scrambled eggs, ice fishing and boiling owls. I think we need better wingnuts. These clowns are beyond parody.

Even worse, Rupert Murdoch.