Double
The Captain Of Her Heart

The full strip is here. He also references waterboarding here and here.
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So said retired Rear Admiral John Hutson during the Mukasey nomination process. Here’s the very long transcript; this line comes near the end. (Thanks to Garry Trudeau for highlighting the quotation.)

Hutson’s entire testimony is worth reading. However, here’s his specific response (emphasis mine) to a question from Senator Ben Cardin (D-MD) about Mukasey’s waterboarding-torture testimony:

The United States as a nation and the attorney general as an individual has to be absolutely unequivocal. We can’t dance around definitions. We can’t dance around, you know, what is torture and what’s cruel and what’s inhumane and what’s degrading as we have done.

In the past, we never had to worry about that, because we were never close to the line. We were always a long ways away from the line.

Now, we want to be right up next to the line, so suddenly what those definitions are become important.

I think that is a terrible mistake for this country, because that same cleverness is going to come back to bite our troops, because it’s our troops who are forward deployed.

When Eisenhower and Marshall and Senator Vincent and others looked at the Geneva Conventions, they were not looking at them as a limitation on our behavior. They were looking at them as a limitation on the enemy’s behavior. They were there to protect U.S. troops. That’s what we were thinking.

Now, suddenly, we’re looking at ways to dance around it, so that we can engage in that kind of activity, and as then-Legal Counsel Gonzales said, so that we can avoid the War Crimes Act.

My goodness. How did we get to that point?

You know, torture is the method of choice of the lazy, the stupid and the pseudo-tough. And that should not be the United States. No matter how you define torture. It’s unconstitutional, it violates statutes, it violates the UCMJ, it violates Common Article 3, it violates what your mother taught you and it violates what you learned in kindergarten. And we ought not be even close to it.

To the lazy, stupid and pseudo-tough, I would add the cruel, and perhaps the frightened. Still, Hutson’s characterization is one of the best I’ve seen.

(Cross-posted at Vagabond Scholar)

From The Des Moines Register:

The average cost of 12 items, in quantities to feed 10 people, typically served during the holiday rose to $42.26, up from $38.10 last year.

I’d like to know how, where and who could feed 10 people a turkey dinner for $42.26. Really. Are they kidding? Have you bought your items for Thanksgiving dinner yet this year? I paid $22.00 for the turkey alone. So for another 20 bucks I should be able to buy all the ingredients for the stuffing, sweet potatoes, vegtables, drinks and dessert for 10 people? I don’t think so. Did someone pull this figure out of their ass or what?

Someone over at Balloon Juice argued the other day that rising gas prices is a good thing. That it’s forcing people to go ‘green’. Well, that may be a valid point, but I won’t call it a “good thing”. With the economy the way it is, many families are living from paycheck to paycheck. Only the wealthy are able to cope with the high prices. Winter is upon us and many are worried about how they’re going to stay warm.

And this is a good thing???

Analysts say the market is now looking at $100 a barrel as the next target to hit.

The declining U.S. dollar and speculation that the U.S. Federal Reserve will again cut interest rates also boosted prices. Some investors put their money into oil contracts, betting that gains in their price will offset dollar weakness.

“The market is now really looking at $100 a barrel as the next target to hit,” said Victor Shum, an energy analyst with Purvin & Gertz in Singapore.

“The fact that we are having this surge in pricing in this short trading week underscores the strength of this bull run for oil.”

Thank God for minimum-wage, seasonal jobs. Wal-Mart, Target, Kmart… we take our hats off to you!

WASHINGTON - Fewer people signed up for jobless benefits last week, an encouraging sign that most companies aren-t resorting to large’scale layoffs as the country copes with continuing problems in the housing and credit markets.

The Labor Department reported Wednesday that new applications filed for unemployment insurance dropped by a seasonally adjusted 11,000 to 330,000 for the week ending Nov. 17. It was the lowest level since the beginning of November. The 330,000 level of claims was in line with economists- forecasts.
[...]

So far, decent job creation and wage growth have helped to offset some of the negative forces hitting some people, problems ranging from weaker home values to hard-to-get credit.

Keith Olbermann and David Shuster discuss McClellan’s book