Along with almost nobody else, Glenn Greenwald has been reporting some strange news about President-Elect Obama:

Obama's transition chief for intelligence policy, John Brennan, was an ardent supporter of torture and one of the most emphatic advocates of FISA expansions and telecom immunity.  

Greenwald has documented Brennan's support for various forms of "enhanced interrogation" in detail, and the good news is that Mr. Brennan opposes water-boarding. That's all the good news.

How can McCain still win the election?

Let's start with Karl Rove's electoral map, which shows McCain trailing with 200 electoral votes. Now assume that voter suppression, vote-flipping by voting machines, and the rest of the GOP's dirty tricks can flip any state where Obama leads by seven percent or less into McCain's column.

So we add Colorado (7%, 9 votes), Florida (2%, 27 votes), Ohio (5%, 20 votes), Nevada (6%, 5 votes), and Virginia (7%, 13 votes), and suddenly McCain has 274 votes.

It would only be a little weirder than the last two bullshit "elections."

Gen. Ray Odierno, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, has refused to negotiate any amendments to the pending status of forces agreement between the United States and Iraq, and threatened to shut down military operations and other vital services throughout the country on Jan. 1 if the Iraqi government doesn't agree to the exact current wording of the agreement.

One of the most contentious issues involved is immunity from prosecution for employees of Blackwater and other private security contractors in Iraq. Tariq al Hashimi, the country's Sunni Muslim vice president, says the United States categorically rejects any proposal to alter this fantastic carte blanche for literally any crime tens of thousands of heavily-armed cowboys may commit. 

It's very likely that on the morning of November 4, Barack Obama will be leading John McCain in the polls by a substantial margin.

If Republicans manage to diddle enough electronic voting machines and disenfranchise enough voters to "win" the election anyway, how will they explain away the polls?

The latest bright idea is being promoted by Alex Lundry, research director at the Republican polling firm, TargetPoint Consulting in a current article on Pollster.com, based on a 2007 article in Public Opinion Quarterly (link, gated).

Mr. Lundry says "blacks are more likely to overreport their registration (along with those that are better educated, live in the "Deep South", and have strong partisan beliefs). The implications of this are particularly relevant to this year's election polls, as the authors detail in this critical point:

If the level of registration overreporting is comparable today, as we believe it is, this subpopulation inflates the number of potential voters in pre-election surveys because they are typically based on samples of self-reported registrants. More importantly, if our finding that blacks are more likely to overreport registration than voting holds true today, as we think it may, this could skew the results of pre-election surveys, likely in favor of a Democratic candidate given blacks' historical affiliation with this party."

It isn't likely that Republican spin-doctors could use this "effect" to explain away as much as a five or six point discrepancy between the polls and whatever vote-count gets reported out of Ohio and Florida, but...

If Republicans can blame a two or three point difference on this variation of the Bradley-Wilder Effect, they may be able to account for another two or three points with the rest of their bag of tricks, and inaugurate John McCain and Sarah Palin on January 20, 2009. 

This is just a couple of excerpts from Baghdad Burning, a blog by an anonymous Iraqi now living in exile in Syria, but still in Baghdad when Saddam was executed...

and it's very old news, but you don't know it.

I have earned just as much money in my "life" as the $480 million that Lehman Brothers paid their former CEO Richard Fuld, but it took me a little longer to earn it.

When I was born in 8000 BC, before the invention of agriculture, I immediately began receiving a typical salary for an assistant professor at a small southern college, $48,000 per year.

I earned this princely salary without a break for 70 years, and as soon as I died at the extraordinarily old age (for a caveman) of 70, I was immediately reincarnated in the obstetrics ward of our cave, and began earning exactly the same salary as before.

At the time of my first "death," 70 years of non-stop professoring had earned me about $3.5 million, significantly more than the average assistant professor will earn in an ordinary career of about 40 years, but some of us are just luckier than others.

After 70 more years of academic toil, I expired again and was immediately reborn and re-hired, and likewise again and again through 143 generations, until my accumulated earnings added up to $480 million!

I hope this little story will inspire the youth of today to get out and fight for the few remaining tenure-track postitions at small southern colleges.

In only 10,000 years, you can earn just as much money as former Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld, or any of the other bankers who destroyed the global economy.

I had read dozens of articles about the financial meltdown before I discovered the real whopper among so many factoids: The derivatives market amounts to more than a quadrillion dollars in obligations.

This is obviously unreal money, and one of the main problems with the recent bail-out is that they are throwing a relatively infinitesimal amount of real money (even if it's fiat currency, you can still spend it) at a vacuum in unreal money that can't conceivably be filled.

Dosing the derivatives market with $700 billion is like trying to medicate a whale with a baby aspirin.

What to do?  We have to disconnect the quadrillion dollars of obligations in unreal money from the rest of the world economy. This thing can't be cured, and and we have to find a way to kill it without letting its corpse crush the rest of us.

A quadrillion dollars in obligations is a black hole than can absorb the entire wealth of the planet Earth, if we let it. It's time to cut it lose, and let the banks which created it go down.

The real functions of private banks have already been assumed by central banks and federal treasuries all over the developed world. It would be ridiculous to bankrupt ourselves to preserve mere shells of the private banks which have already speculated themselves into irrelevance.