Why did boarding take over from cure, treatment and torture? Darius Rejali, the author of the recent book “Torture and Democracy” and a professor at Reed College, has an answer: “There is a special vocabulary for torture. When people use tortures that are old, they rename them and alter them a wee bit. They invent slightly new words to mask the similarities. This creates an inside club, especially important in work where secrecy matters. Waterboarding is clearly a jailhouse joke. It refers to surfboarding” — a word found as early as 1929 — “they are attaching somebody to a board and helping them surf. Torturers create names that are funny to them.”

But they’re also trying to keep that as-yet-unreleased Pentagon study, showing there’s NO link between AQ and Iraq off the front pages, IMHO.

Also, NYT reporting that Carlyle Group (not Bush Sr, just a subsidiary) was leveraged 31:1 in dollars. Strangely, banks are calling in their loans. Whodda thunk it?

No doubt they also want Fallon off the front page.
Many reasons for them to shout and create a big kerfuffle over the FISA bill.

I thought the HJC letter was outstanding.
Methinks they’ve taken a few lessons in clear writing from the CCIA.

However, I have several friends who have left medical practice in the US, because they’re so frustrated with the condition of health care, the power of insurance companies, the paperwork, and the risk of being sued. I’ve heard docs say, ‘Good health care depends on good personal relationships and trust. You cannot have that if one party is fearful of being sued for more money than the entire practice makes in five years.’

Some docs have been traumatized by lawsuits, or seeing their friends sued. I’m not saying docs shouldn’t be accountable; however, the current system is impacting the quality of care while giving ever more power to the insurance companies.

John Edwards would have been able to address this problem; let’s hope he still has a chance, b/c from what I’m told that man really does understand the complexities involved.

bmaz – Roberts is hopeless.

Ishmael, FWIW, Buchanan worked in the Nixon WH, but he is enormously more decent (and, apparently good natured) than Colson, or Liddy. If you ever have a chance to read John Dean’s Conservatives Without Conscience, you’ll see that Dean distinguishes Buchanan as a man who can think for himself, and who doesn’t simply toady to whoever is in power. Also, Buchanan doesn’t do the ‘pile on’ and I can’t recall ever seeing him be personally malicious to anyone. He really does care about the intellectual integrity of an argument.

The neocons and Coulters, etc, just care about ‘winning’ at whatever cost. Buchanan understands that if you violate your principles to obtain an objective, you’ve only achieved a Phyrric victory. He has an ethical core that the wingnuts and neocons lack.

On the OT exchange re the speechwriter’s having scripted Bush to disparage trial lawyers, there is a campaign strategy aspect to that Republican plank, namely, trial lawyers are known to be generous contributors to the Democratic party in the US, but the Republican aspersion is based on vilification of the people and their profession. Having seen the inside of corporate counsel as well as having visited the lists the wherein insurance counsel jousts with defenders of the corporeally injured, I would add that part of the insurance defense gambit of benefits delay calculus is a projection of the likely damages, and likelihood that the judges selected to hear or arbitrate will award only minimal penalties; even in instances keyed to calendar of time passing doubling or trebling damages; and nearly always seeking compromised experts. In our state there are various elected state officials and oversight bodies to scrutinize these affairs, but corporate and insurance counsel ingenuity usually finds workarounds; I have spent considerable effort encouring those watchdogs, and legislators, to take a view sufficiently wide that patterns of subornment become obvious in the macro view and become controllable, whereas in individual cases the injustices become miniaturized and have less impact, seeming less offensively unfair. There is a lot of plain basic deceit practiced in that area of defense law, as well, sending warnings and badgering the injured, then waiting a while to see if the hurt inspires more aggressive complaints or if, in contradistinction, if the threats simply work and have the effect of diminishing the cost of defense.

You know, Ben Stein is like Pat Buchanan to me; I don’t agree with everything they say, maybe not even half of it, but they are honest and consistent in their convictions, even if they are wrongheaded. I will take that any day over the modern two faced hypocritical conservative jackals.

For those who can stand the cognitive dissonance of reading an essay by Pat Buchanan 90% of which is faultless from a progressive perspective, I commend this.

Told you they were too cute by a half with that deceptive letter. I would have written the Qwest missive, only shorter.