I hesitated to post this, but it’s the clearest video I’ve seen of the apparent capture of Qaddafi and, while disturbing to watch, it’s not as graphic as this kind of thing could be.

I remember having a similar reaction to images of Saddam Hussein after his capture: how banal the whole situation seems, how reductionist, how one man is ultimately too small and fragile to be the receptacle for all the retributive anger and violence he himself has unleashed.

Ultimately it challenges our sense of what it means to do justice. A summary execution isn’t very satisfying, but neither is execution after due process in a case like this. Like the hole he left in the ground in Lockerbie, there is just a chasm of injustice too deep to be filled. Read More

Lindsey Graham went on Fox News this morning and attempted to make a sow’s ear out of the silk purse of Obama’s recent foreign policy successes.

Hillary Clinton: GOP presidential candidates can’t have it both ways on Iraq.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) is flirting with 70 percent of the vote in early returns and is projected to win handily.

Marc Morano has been a vocal member of the climate change denial crowd for a while now. As a one-time aide to Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), while he was chairman of the Committee on Environment and Public Works, Morano actually wielded some power. But I have to give him credit. He’s the first person to expose me to the use of the word “warmist” to describe those who accept the scientific consensus that manmade CO2 emissions are having profound environmental effects. (I guess that makes Morano a “coldist”?)

I now see, thanks to Morano, that this term has some currency among deniers (and among those who struggle to spell “warmest”).

What’s prompted us to throw a spotlight on Morano again? He and others in the professional ranks of those committed to blocking the regulation of carbon emissions are howling over the betrayal of physicist Richard Muller, whose own skepticism about climate change science led him to undertake a review of the global data, with helpful funding from, among others, a Koch brother’s foundation. Muller’s findings have disqualified him as a fellow traveler and have catapulted climate change deniers even deeper into flat earth territory.