Friday!

* The ping-pong match in the press over the public option continues. Nobody can figure out whether or not Pelosi has the votes, whether or not Obama supports an Olympia-Snowe-style trigger, or just what will happen with the cloture vote in the Senate. Ezra Klein compares the likely House and Senate bills, which leads Matt Yglesias to suggest a best-of-both-worlds approach. Meanwhile a Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll shows that public support for the public option remains steady at around 60%, which would be important if the Senate were a properly representative body.

* Lots of buzz today about Neill Blomkamp's next film after District 9, described by SCI FI Wire as a balls-out sci-fi epic.

* 'A Mid-Atlantic Miracle': Keeping public university costs down in Maryland.

* A judge has ruled the war crimes case against Blackwater/Xe will go forward.

* 'Living on $500,000 a Year': Reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's tax returns. John Scalzi compares Fitzgerald's income and lifestyle to a writer's today.

* Fox News CEO Roger Ailes for president? This would take "fair and balanced" to a whole new level.

* And your entirely random chart of the day: The Population of Rome Through History. Via Kottke.

Early morning Wednesday.

* We finally saw Up! tonight. All I can say is if the first ten minutes don't break your heart you have no soul.

* Blackwater founder Erik Prince has apparently been implicated in a huge swath of crimes by a former employee and a Marine working with the company, ranging from tax evasion and money laundering to weapons smuggling to obstruction of justice and destruction of evidence to crimes of war and even to the murder of federal informants. (See MetaFilter for more.) My now-incredibly-timely review of Master of War is getting bumped up accordingly and will probably be online (updated) at Independent Weekly in a day or so. This is all pretty shocking, even by Blackwater standards.

* In not-completely-frakked-up news, Bill Clinton did a good thing today, a win for just about everybody but infamous douchebag of liberty John Bolton.



* More on the Olbermann/O'Reilly saga from Glenn Greenwald, Jane Hamsher, and David Sirota. While I appreciate that he finds himself in a tough spot here, Olbermann is not doing himself any favors with his behavior; making one type of statement on-the-air and another off makes it very clear what is going on, and makes him look like a fool.

* The 100 Greatest Sci-Fi Movies. Outraged to see Galaxy Quest only squeaking by at #95. And 12 Monkeys quietly buried in the 80s? Nonsense.

* "In Which I Ruin Rashomon For Everyone, Forever."

* And your short pictorial history of robots.

"The (al Qaida-Iraq) links go back," he said. "We know for example from interrogating detainees in Guantanamo that al Qaida sent individuals to Baghdad to be trained in C.W. and B.W. technology, chemical and biological weapons technology. These are all matters that are there for anybody who wants to look at it."

Drip, drip, drip: revisiting Cheney's Iraq statements in light of recent evidence that torture was used specifically to "prove" a link between Iraq and al Qaeda to bolster the case for the war with Iraq. Previous. More previous.

UPDATE: Elsewhere, at Think Progress, Faiz Shakir finds conservatives on Fox News being completely open about what they hope to achieve with their Nancy Pelosi distraction campaign:

Fox host Neil Cavuto wondered whether “both parties will cease and desist” from investigations:

Is it a potential Mexican standoff? And by that, I mean, Senator, that Democrats feel they have the goods on the prior administration to drag out hearings on what they knew about Iraq and when. Now Republicans have the goods, presumably, on Nancy Pelosi about what she knew about interrogation and when. So to avoid mutual self-destruction, both parties cease and desist.

More on this from Steve Benen.

Canada ignores request to bar Bush.

Something else I am gushing over: CBS is reporting that "President-elect Barack Obama is preparing to issue an executive order his first week in office — and perhaps his first day — to close the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, according to two presidential transition team advisers." Via Daily Kos.

At last, the truth: Condoleezza Rice admits she, Ashcroft, and other Bush Administration officials held high-level talks on torture. This is nothing less than an admission of active complicity in war crimes, and it underscores the necessity that some sort of legal accountability be undertaken by the next administration. There are good arguments for criminal prosecution and good arguments for a Truth & Reconciliation Commission, but there must be something—the things that have happened over the last eight years simply cannot be swept under the rug. For the soul of the nation and to make good with history, we need to admit and come to terms with what this administration has done in all our names.

Dept. of Sounds Good to Me: Bush administration worried about possible criminal prosecution. More from Glenn Greenwald, with particular attention to the Democrats' continued complicity in all this—which in turn points us pretty quickly back to the pessimism I expressed just last week over the FISA debacle, now with an even darker color about it:

As I was writing at the tail end of an Yglesias comment thread last night, the grandstanding you're seeing on the lefty blogs over telecom immunity seems to me to be misdirected anger over the dawning recognition that Bush and his cronies really are going to get away with everything scot free. Well, they are. Pelosi took impeachment off the table—wrongly, I think, though I understand the political calculus involved—and it's extremely unlikely there will be any substantive investigation of Bush following Obama's election. There never has been. We'll "turn the page." "For the good of the country," a criminal Republican administration will once again walk, and the really sad fact is the exact same bunch of thugs will probably pop back up yet another decade down the line to do it all again.

We lost the fight to hold Bush accountable when Pelosi took impeachment off the table.

I remain pretty skeptical that any of these people will ever face any sort of justice for what they've done, though I'd be very happy if we somehow do see it. There's still more at Amygdala, all about our learned helplessness in the face of the last eight years.

"There is no longer any doubt that the current administration committed war crimes," [Major Gen. Antonio] Taguba says. "The only question is whether those who ordered torture will be held to account."