What's astounding to me is not the belligerent stupidity of a person willing to volunteer to be tortured but the fact that, even granting this kind of immense belligerent stupidity, these five-second waterboardees nonetheless admit afterwards that they were wrong. Wouldn't we expect them to go the other way, to retrench and insist it really wasn't that bad? It's an absolutely perfect opportunity for macho posturing, yet they demur. What's stopping people who lie in basically every aspect of their public lives from lying about this as well? It's weird.

Evening links.

* Rats-leaving-a-sinking-ship Watch: McCain/Palin loses David Frum and Christopher Hitchens.

* Meet the man behind the Obama smears: Andy Martin.

* The pollster for the campaign that beat Bradley says there's no such thing as a Bradley Effect. Let's hope not.

* Milan Kundera's past may have caught up with him.

* And I'm have this awesome quote about the media bookmarked for weeks, a great reminder of who they really work for:

The following remarks were apparently made by John Swinton in 1880, then the preeminent New York journalist, probably one night in during that same year. Swinton was the guest of honour at a banquet given him by the leaders of his craft. Someone who knew neither the press nor Swinton offered a toast to the independent press. Swinton outraged his colleagues by replying:

"There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history, in America, as an independent press. You know it and I know it.

"There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinion out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone.

"The business of the journalists is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it, and what folly is this toasting an independent press?

"We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."

(Source: Labor's Untold Story, by Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais, published by United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America, NY, 1955/1979.)

In the news:

* In response to public outrage—and who thought that could still accomplish anything?—the Bureau of Land Management has reversed the absurd two-year moratorium on public-land solar projects that got me so riled up a few days ago.

* Is Bush about to close Guantánamo? I imagine extralegal prisons are a whole lot less fun lately, though knowing the Bush administration they'd probably only plan to close it in preparation for Guantánamo II on the Moon.

* Utah responds to the high price of energy by moving to a four-day workweek for state employees. Meanwhile, Sal Cinquemani at Slant Magazine takes aim at the central contradiction that has crippled the Democrats' ability to properly respond to the high price of gasoline: so long as we are unable to think the crisis outside a capitalist, market-oriented framework, $140 a barrel still isn't high enough.

* Jesse Helms died today, one day after Bozo the Clown, and everyone else has already made the joke.

* Despite the latest denialist meme, volcanoes are not melting Arctic ice.

* Christopher Hitchens now agrees waterboarding is torture. Why? He let himself be waterboarded. (Here's video.) I really hate to kick a guy just when he's finally starting to see the light, but it's worth saying that there are still plenty of people whose moral sense is not so deformed by eight years of Bushism that we knew better than to torture people without an object lesson in basic human decency—and it'd be nice if, you know, we were maybe listened to occasionally. Via MeFi.

* And, at NPR, the strange odyssey of Napoleon's penis.

Today is the [Undisclosed Location]quinox, which means we're halfway through the term. I could do this all summer. I'm not completely exhausted at all.

Clearing the decks this morning:

* What do the Dutch know that we don't? Thousands of people in the Netherlands are preparing for the 2012 apocalypse.

* A judge has ruled that, legally speaking, Duke football completely sucks.

* Nothing makes me feel more curmudgeonly than agreeing with Christopher Hitchens about anything, but my god—you'd think Tim Russert had been president before he became the pope. And that's before this stuff about miracles started.

* On the virtues of taking it slow as a novelist. Finally, my laziness patience has been vindicated!

* And good news from the world of science: the Large Hadron Collider probably won't destroy the earth.