From RealClearPolitics:

Hundreds of angry Americans took to pouring their Absolut vodka down the drain after the company published an advertisement showing several Southwestern states as part of Mexico. Sensing an opening akin to a major gaffe on the campaign trail, SKYY Vodka has issued a press release slamming their Swedish rivals. As it turns our, SKYY supports the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

This is from the press release, quoting a SKYY Vodka rep:

"Like SKYY Vodka, the residents of states like California, Texas and Arizona are exceptionally proud of the fact that they are from the United States of America," said Dave Karraker, SKYY Vodka. "To imply that they might be interested in changing their mailing addresses, as our competitor seems to be suggesting in their advertising, is a bit presumptuous."

Here's a link to the ad: http://www.stuff.co.nz/images/714571.jpg

Elizabeth Edwards has an editorial in the NY Times on the shoddy state of the U.S. press:

Who is responsible for the veil of silence over Senator Biden? Or Senator Dodd? Or Gov. Tom Vilsack? Or Senator Sam Brownback on the Republican side?

The decision was probably made by the same people who decided that Fred Thompson was a serious candidate. Articles purporting to be news spent thousands upon thousands of words contemplating whether he would enter the race, to the point that before he even entered, he was running second in the national polls for the Republican nomination. Second place! And he had not done or said anything that would allow anyone to conclude he was a serious candidate. A major weekly news magazine put Mr. Thompson on its cover, asking — honestly! — whether the absence of a serious campaign and commitment to raising money or getting his policies out was itself a strategy.

On Bloggingheads.tv, John Horgan, of the Stevens Center for Science Writings, interviews Michael Shellenberger, author of Break Through. Shellenberger advocates government involvement in climate control, and although he is a little bit too moderate on the issue for my taste, I think that he raises a good point about the inability of many environmentalists to enter the political process. For better or worse, the anti-global warming right needs to be brought around, and they hate anti-market arguments. Here's Shellenberger's website.

I just discovered bloggingheads.tv. It's a massive collection of discussions between prominent bloggers, from Eric Posner to James Pinkerton, etc. It's far more interesting than the media-driven pseudo-intellectual debates on the news channels.

UCTV's Conversations With History has an interview with Amartya Sen. Sen is very helpful in thinking about trajectories of thought, overlaps between philosophy and economics, and how to do good work.

New York times has Bjork's new music video, Wanderlust. You've never seen anything like it.

So the slate.com has the John Yoo torture memo, the one that tells Bush administration officials how torture is kind of, sort of illegal, but not if you close your eyes and pray and pretend like nothing is going on. I haven't read it yet, but I'm somewhat familiar with the legal argument: basically, because terrorists are not officially enemy combatants, the Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War doesn't apply to them. Okay, even if that's true (it's not), the Convention on Torture and Other Cruel and Unusual Punishment does. Moreover, every Geneva convention makes explicit that the "state of exception"/"executive order" argument DOES NOT ALLOW FOR THE VIOLATION OF THE CONVENTION. But, if you write enough memos, make enough statements to the press, and backpeddle enough times, no one knows what's going on, and you can do whatever you want. I'll dub it the "excessive deliberation defense."