Plemons was tall and skinny and good-looking, with light brown skin. He had joined the Army late, at twenty-seven, after discovering that his master’s degree in writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro didn’t make him employable. “I wanted to pay off some debt and also be part of this war,” he said. “Whether it’s our war or Obama’s war, I’m kind of glad the focus is on Afghanistan. Not so much fighting war as providing security. I believe in the United Nations and NATO and the diplomatic side. It’ll take a couple of generations for real progress to come about.” His attitude made him “what the Army calls a liberal douche-bag—a term of endearment, I guess.” He went on, “A lot of guys here are eighteen, nineteen years old. They were twelve years old when 9-11-2001 happened. They’re ready to be warriors, they’re young—part of it’s posturing. They want to make a difference in the way they can, and the way they were trained to is to fight.”

One of my very best friends (and a personal superhero) is interviewed this week at the New Yorker's "Interesting Times" blog about his service as a medic in Afghanistan.

Plemons had been one of the speakers at the service. I had been struck by his remarks. He had said that soldiers had “dual lives” and had to hide one of their identities from their loved ones, “like superheroes.” He had concluded, “We cannot be swayed by feelings that could corrupt us: feelings of guilt, anger, and revenge. In the end, grief shall not take us, and we shall remember.”

Come home safe.

Hard to believe privatizing the military would turn out badly.

Been busy today. Here are links.

* Pam Spaulding talks about the Durham City Council meeting last night at which a pro-same-sex marriage resolution was passed.

* "In the future, a famous person will die every fifteen minutes."

* More bad news for Republican Chris Christie as a nonpartisan ethics group, NJ-CREW, has now called for an investigation into his time as U.S. Attorney. He's also facing criticism over unreported interest from a loan made to current staffers at the U.S. Attorney office.

* The Obama White House says reports of the death of the public option are greatly exaggerated. (No word yet on the pubic option.)

* David Cross was funny last night on the Daily Show.

* Mad Men footnotes.

* Xenophobia for Dummies: A District 9 Primer. Of particular interest are the historical details surrounding apartheid-era District 6. Via this AskMe, with more.

* Meanwhile, the usually-more-astute Spencer Ackerman denies that America is anything like those nasty racists in District 9's Johannesburg. What's a million Iraqis give or take?

* And the absolute worst news of all time: "Arrested Development movie is nowhere near happening."

Two book reviews from my household in the Indy this week: my review of Master of War: Blackwater USA's Erik Prince and the Business of War and Jaimee's review of Fred Chappell's latest book of poems, Shadow Box.

In a related sidebar, Lisa Sorg asks: "What's the difference between Daniel Boyd and Blackwater's Erik Prince?"

Friday night in Jersey links.

* My eighth Infinite Summer post this morning on brains, rats, happiness, and the problem of atheism drew some really great comments both from my regular readers and other IJ readers; check them out.

* From @cfoster, participating in that thread: news of Inherent August.

* Topher says Dollhouse season two will live in the shadow of "Epitaph One."

* When does a Prius have the same environmental impact as a Hummer? The 95 percent of the time it’s parked.

* Incredibly, President George W. Bush told French President Jacques Chirac in early 2003 that Iraq must be invaded to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible’s satanic agents of the Apocalypse.

Honest. This isn’t a joke. The president of the United States, in a top-secret phone call to a major European ally, asked for French troops to join American soldiers in attacking Iraq as a mission from God. Via Boing Boing.

* And what do Slate readers fear? Their top five apocalypses.

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.

Tuesday!

* Bernie Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in jail on Monday. I think what I enjoy most about this is the absurd dialogue, oddly ubiquitous, over whether the punishment is "too lenient" or "too harsh"—as if, that is, it were a sentence one might possibly serve out and not more years than any human being (much less any 71-year-old human being) has ever lived. They might as well have sentenced him to a million jillion years.

* Uranium on the Moon! We need to secure it before the Russians Chinese Martians Islamofascists get their hands on it; clearly we have no choice left but to blow up the Moon.

* The World Clock will depress you in any number of ways. Only 14,766 days of oil left; forty years, less than a third of Madoff's prison sentence. (via @charliejane)

* Obama spoke today to the controversies over gay rights that are rapidly disillusioning so many of his supporters. Via LawDork, who seems reasonably pleased with the speech, if at the same time anxious for real action to be taken.

* 'Iraqis jubilantly celebrate U.S. troop withdrawal': U.S. forces handed over formal control of Iraq’s major cities today ... “a defining step toward ending the U.S. combat role in the country.”

* Twitter Politics: With the Iranian election, we've seen a privately owned technology becoming a vital part of the infrastructure supporting political activity. That's a problem.

* Debating the public option: Will it just turn into a giveaway to the private insurers? Do you really have to ask?

* It seems like only yesterday that Obama was being accused of orchestrating the coup in Honduras. Now he's a communist for opposing it.

* And Ezra Klein has your chilling vision of things to come.

"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.

Following up on an earlier post this morning, there's very good questions starting to come out that point to what exactly the purpose of the Bush administration's torture policies were. Why, as Lawrence Wilkerson writes, did the torture stop in 2004, if it is so successful and necessary to national security? Why were questions about Iraq among the first put to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed when he was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003?

Meanwhile, Josh Marshall has the definitive rejoinder to pro-torture partisans eager to make this story about Nancy Pelosi:

Here's where we are. There are various documents and recollections from around through the news ether. Pelosi's accusers are saying she knew more than she admits. She says that many of these claims are false and the documents perhaps erroneous, and that she's been consistent and true to her opposition to torture. And then she says, and I think there should be a broad-ranging Truth Commission to investigate what happened, who's telling the truth and who isn't. You can see it here at about 3:45 in.

That says it all. She wants it all investigated.

I have no idea what Nancy Pelosi knew and when she knew it. It's possible she has legal culpability for human rights abuses committed under the Bush administration, and possible that even if she is not legally culpable she should be shamed into resigning. There's only one way to find out.

Friday Friday Friday.

* People are once again rediscovering what everybody used to know: the purpose of torture is to extract false confessions, not gather actionable intelligence. In this case, the torture appears to have been directed towards "finding" a connection between Iraq and al Qaeda with regard to 9/11—part of a much larger process of manipulation and outright fabrication that we've long known leads directly through the Office of the Vice President. See also: MyDD and Attackerman. There's no easy way for Obama to deal with the sordid legacy of the Bush administration, but there's no way to sweep it under the rug. I still think a truth and reconciliation commission is the most politically feasible model for this, but if not that, prosecutions; it's got to be one or the other.

* I knew I wouldn't do anything productive this morning until I beat all 35 levels of Minim. And lo, the prophecy was true. (Level 23 was the one that took real thinking.)

* In 2002, rogue NASA interns stole millions of dollars in moon rocks. This is the untold story of how they did it.

* The other environmental apocalypse: The Center for Biological Diversity has sued to EPA to take action over ocean acidification.

A fake New York Times of the future has appeared on the streets of New York.

Busy week ahead, so posting will be comparatively light except insofar as I allow the Internets to distract me from my work. We'll see how I do.

A few links:

* The U.S. has apparently launched not-at-all-October-Surprise forays into Syria and Pakistan.

* Barack draws a record 100,000+ crowd in Denver. (See photo.)

* NBC numbers man Chuck Todd is having an increasingly difficult time keeping "objectivity" in the face of Obama's overwhelming advantages; here he is on Meet the Press talking about the early voting explosion and the possibility of African-American voter participation in the neighborhood of 95-100%.

* More early voting buzz: the latest official numbers show Democrats taking a lead over Republicans in the votes already cast, 871,251 to 818,799. As early voting tends to favor Republicans due to the disproportionate absentee balloting of military voters and the elderly, this is good news.

* Jewish voters in Pennsylvania have been warned by the state GOP not to make the same mistake their German ancestors did in the 1930s and '40s. There is so much wrong with this, I don't even know where to begin.

* Who will replace Obama as the senator from Illinois? Jesse Jackson, Jr., wants the job, despite fears that he may be unelectable statewide.

* The Ann Arbor News endorses *nobody* for president. Well done, sirs.

* And the Internet has created its most bizarrely Dada meme yet: Robocop on a Unicorn.

News at noon.

* Domestic terrorism at a Dayton mosque. More at BeliefNet.

* Now McCain will (apparently) show up to vote on the bailout after all. But will he suspend his campaign beforehand?

* Is this a 'victory'? Peter Galbraith takes a sober look at Iraq in the New York Review of Books. Via MeFi.

* Nancy Gibbs in Time tries to puzzle out whether the problem is Sarah Palin's handlers or Sarah Palin herself, while Howard Kurtz says that CBS is still sitting on even more damaging footage from the interview with Katie Couric. (UPDATE: CBS says they're not. 2ND UPDATE: The footage Kurtz was referring to is actually from a different interview.)

* All this comes at a time when the McCain camp is increasingly, visibly concerned about Palin's ability to perform in the debates, even taking the highly unusual step of trying to lower expectations for her opponent.

* And the evidence continues to suggest that Obama's debate performance was better than even I thought at the time. James Fallows has received a bunch of links for this post comparing the debate to 1960, 1980, and 1992:

In each of those cases, a fresh, new candidate (although chronologically older in Reagan's case) had been gathering momentum at a time of general dissatisfaction with the "four more years" option of sticking with the incumbent party. The question was whether the challenger could stand as an equal with the more experienced, tested, and familiar figure. In each of those cases, the challenger passed the test -- not necessarily by "winning" the debate, either on logical points or in immediate audience or polling reactions, but by subtly reassuring doubters on the basic issue of whether he was a plausible occupant of the White House and commander in chief.

Steve Benen elaborates with a round-up of polling data and analysis supporting this basic claim. For high information voters, Obama may have seemed to merely draw (though I thought at the time and still think he won on the merits)—but for lower information voters expectations were significantly lower for Obama than McCain, and so Obama seemed to those viewers to be much more clearly the winner.

Springtime for Hitler: Everyone is all smiles in this photo album from an officer at Auschwitz. Here's the full album. Via MeFi and Boing Boing.