As we know, Juan Cole is an “anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist, an apologist for radical Islam” who “peddles Hamas propaganda.” Obviously if he were Iranian, he would have just voted for Ahmadinejad while shouting “Allahu Akbar.”

And yet today he’s written extensively about the evidence the election in Iran was just stolen by the country’s Islamic theocracy.

I’m confused. It’s like the world’s turned upside down!

From Time’s embarassing “please buy our magazine” suckup article on Twitter:

Injecting Twitter into that conversation fundamentally changed the rules of engagement. It added a second layer of discussion and brought a wider audience into what would have been a private exchange. And it gave the event an afterlife on the Web. Yes, it was built entirely out of 140-character messages, but the sum total of those tweets added up to something truly substantive, like a suspension bridge made of pebbles.

And what could be more substantive … than a suspension bridge made of pebbles!

How they view abortion in the rightwingoverse.

Brooks, this morning:

Sonia Sotomayor had bad timing. If she’d entered college in the late-1950s or early-1960s, she would have been surrounded by an ethos that encouraged smart young ethnic kids to assimilate. If she’d entered Princeton and Yale in the 1980s, her ethnicity and gender would have been mildly interesting traits among the many she might possibly possess.

Leaving aside the likelihood that Sotomayor would have had the opportunity to enter college in the late fifties, note the weaselly phrasing Brooks employs. If she’d “entered college” in the late fifties, early sixties … if she’d “entered Princeton and Yale” in the eighties.

See the thing is, Yale didn’t admit women until 1969. Brooks knows this, but it undercuts his thesis, so he tries to distract the audience with a clumsy rhetorical sleight of hand. And as with a bad magician, the clumsiness becomes more compelling than the illusion he’s attempting to create.

Today the news is filled with remembrances of the heroism of the soldiers who stormed the beach at Normandy. But why have we as a society forgotten the heroism of those who, on that terrible day, took French classes and played baseball in the afternoon?

This question is particularly piquant for me because my grandfather was one of these heroes. Here’s the cover of his journal from World War II:

Journal
—
CA Det D3D1
—
First U.S. Army
—
Normandy
Northern France
Germany
Cour Z

And here’s his entry for June 6th, 1944:

6 June 1944

French class and road march made up morning schedule. Detachment played baseball in the afternoon, after which all members discussed implications of D-day.

Just imagining what it was like for those young men gives me chills.

(He did end up in France ten days later.)

The torture apologia chart.

So, one of the things I’ve been keeping busy with over the past few months, along with finishing up the children’s book, has been working on some artwork for Pearl Jam. Had to stay quiet about it until now, and I still can’t say too much about it, but I do want to note that the image that Conan held up tonight was only part of a greater whole — it wasn’t the finished album cover. And apart from saying that working with the band has been an utterly fantastic experience, that’s probably most of what I can share at this point.