An update

OK, folks, I'm back, after sloth and vacation. I was just going to wait till I go back to the States to update again, but there's enough that I'm reading that it's worth mentioning.

I wonder whether I should go with smaller items. Oh well.

• First off, another week, another Bush administration resignation. What was that old Freedom Movement poster?

  "There's a street in Itta Bena called Freedom. There's a town in Mississippi called Liberty. There's a department in Washington called Justice."

Justice, it appears, is only the name of the department, not of its profession, which is obfuscation and denial.

• The noise surrounding Guantanamo closure seems genuine this time, despite White House denials. Still, I'm not holding my breath. Let's not forget that over a year ago, Bush said he'd "like to close Guantanamo, but..." Deferring again, this time to the military, Bush eschews responsibility that belongs to him solely. Way to lead.

• Religious students have abducted foreign nationals in Pakistan and are holding them in a mosque for "immoral activities." Say, there seems to be a deafening silence from the Pakistani Parliament on this injustice, right after they condemned England's knighthood of Salman Rushdie. Irshad Manji nails the hypocrisy of demanding "tolerance" towards Islam while its extremists use it to justify the greatest intolerance.

• If you haven't seen the trailer for the Coen Brothers' new movie "No Country for Old Men"... you should. Javier Bardem is a bad-ass. If you love Westerns, blood, or Cormac McCarthy, this is the movie for you.

• (Speaking of which, I'll blog soon about the last two solid films I've seen, Persepolis and Death Proof, which was released in France separately from its Grindhouse partner, Planet Terror.)

• Google's solar panels. Pretty neat business.

• Um, isn't photography legal? I guess not.

• NPR runs down some helpful facts and analysis on health insurance to think about surrounding Sicko, the new Michael Moore feature.

• Good news from Iraq? I hope so. Instapundit notes that this has been weakly covered by MSM, but let's be fair, we've heard this "good news" spiel before. It only goes to further emphasize how September is a meaningless date. When Petraeus and the new commanders testify before Congress in September, the "We're Winning!" spin will just keep on coming, while people continue to die unnecessarily. Anbar has been subdued, but the top al-Qaeda commanders slipped away in Baqubah. We squash one insurgent group and another one rises up. And, surprise, surprise: the political situation is still a mess, with the sectarian tensions not weakening.

• Slate's slideshow of (really) early movies is worth a gander.

• Noel Murray and Scott Tobias do AV Club crosstalk about the efficacy of the MPAA's rating system. Worth the read if you've got time.

• Ridiculous. 78 in a 55 zone in Virginia = 1,250 bucks. It's another perk of being rich... you can afford to speed.

• Must-read: Seymour Hersh's piece on Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba (Ret.), who wrote the report to investigate prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison. Essentially, he was sold out for doing his job and having integrity. As we've learned in this Administration, being a good man and a good foot soldier are incompatible. Taguba has some harsh words at the end:

  “From the moment a soldier enlists, we inculcate loyalty, duty, honor, integrity, and selfless service,” Taguba said. “And yet when we get to the senior-officer level we forget those values. I know that my peers in the Army will be mad at me for speaking out, but the fact is that we violated the laws of land warfare in Abu Ghraib. We violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We violated our own principles and we violated the core of our military values. The stress of combat is not an excuse, and I believe, even today, that those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable.”

• For today's video selection, I really wanted to pick the International Players' Anthem with UGK (ft. Outkast), just because it's so nice to hear Andre rapping again with some great beats and a solid video. You can see it here. The winner, though, is the video that has taken the internet by storm, a five second, erroneously named clip that shouldn't (and isn't) funny, which of course didn't stop me from laughing at it. Here's "Dramatic Chipmunk."