Mark A. R. Kleiman surveys the wing-nut blogosphere and discovers that torture doesn't appear to offend anybody's 'values'....

...reading [the] commenters is enough to spoil your appetite for dinner. "We're not torturing anyone, and anyway torture doesn't hurt so much, and if torture is going on it must be unauthorized, and in any case the SOB's deserved it and aren't protected by international law." ..."and any way it's all the Democrats' fault because they hate Bush and America so much you can't believe anything they say, even when it's true." Naturally, there's the obligatory reference to fraternity hazing.

The Guardian Quiet, or I'll call democracy

Iraqi women were long the most liberated in the Middle East. Occupation has confined them to their homes

The US state department has launched a $10m "Iraqi women's democracy initiative" to train Iraqi women in the skills and practices of democratic life ahead of the forthcoming elections. ...The fact that the money will go mainly to organizations embedded with the US administration, such as the Independent Women's Forum (IWF) founded by Dick Cheney's wife Lynn, was, of course, not mentioned.