grumble.

Patch notes for US Server, version 44.0. Glad to see they’re finally balancing some PVP and working towards making some of the de/buffs apply in ways that make more sense.

I haven’t even thought about Lieberman in, like, a month.

Pulled this off the front page of whitehouse.gov. Fairly standard photo op, though it’s given more significance because it’s one of the pictures they chose for the front page.

But even regardless of the photo-opness of this particular pic, one thing that’s been clear in the few years Obama’s been in the national spotlight is that he’s a good father and family man. Whenever you see his wife and children together with him, they just seem like a family. It’s kind of refreshing to see a politician who doesn’t use his family values as a club, but just has ‘em.

Here’s a somewhat flowery editorial quoted in Democratic Strategist about the change from Republican rule:

[W]e are taking leave not merely of a single Administration. For twelve years the Republican Party has been in power. During ten of those years it controlled the executive and legislative branches of the government. When, a few years hence, an attempt is made to minimize the disaster of this last quadrennium, and to point to a preceding eight year period of material development and growth, let it be noted that in a purely material sense the American people are much worse off today than they were twelve years ago. Far more than was gained has been swept away. Savings have been dissipated, lives have been blasted, families disintegrated. Misery and insecurity exist to a degree unprecedented in our national life. And spiritually the American people have been debauched by the materialism which made dollar-chasing the accepted way of life and accumulation of riches the goal of earthly existence.

Overly flowery, because that was the prevalent writing style when this was written about the outgoing Hoover administration.

Proponents of torture love bringing up the ticking time bomb scenario, despite the fact it’s a straw man. It’s basically a fun “what if” game you play with severe and debilitating pain. What if there was a ticking time bomb somewhere in a US city, and all you had to do was splash some water in a terrorist’s face to find out where? Would you throw a moist towelette at a terrorist to save ten thousand lives?

In the link above, Holder handles the question fairly well: he rejects the premise, because he doesn’t believe that bringing a person to the brink of death via filling his water with lungs is the only (or a reliable) method available to get information from the person. But what I’d really like is to hear someone answer it by extending the hypothetical.

Okay, so we waterboard him, and he tells us the bomb is 50 miles that-a-way. But we get there and it turns out he just lied, and it was actually 75 miles in the other direction, which we found out quite suddenly when it blew up. What have we gained except some extra storage space where our soul used to be?