Quick Hits, non-Lieberman/Lamont edition

I've gone overboard on that race and said all there is to say for the time being. Here's some information about what's happening outside the Nutmeg State:

• The President is busy doing what he does best, avoiding accountability, this time by trying to amend the US War Crimes Act:

Officials say the amendments would alter a U.S. law passed in the mid-1990s that criminalized violations of the Geneva Conventions, a set of international treaties governing military conduct in wartime. The conventions generally bar the cruel, humiliating and degrading treatment of wartime prisoners without spelling out what all those terms mean.

The draft U.S. amendments to the War Crimes Act would narrow the scope of potential criminal prosecutions to 10 specific categories of illegal acts against detainees during a war, including torture, murder, rape and hostage-taking.

"People have gotten worried, thinking that it's quite likely they might be under a microscope," said a U.S. official. Foreigners are using accusations of unlawful U.S. behavior as a way to rein in American power, the official said, and the amendments are partly meant to fend this off.

Of course, signatories to international treaties are bound by those treaties, so decriminalizing at home won't work internationally. But I'm shocked, SHOCKED that the Bush Administration is trying to change laws and go around the Congress.

• Environmental disaster and war come together as a massive oil spill on the Lebanese coast caused by Israeli bombing could take the better part of a decade to clean up. Which won't happen until the war ends, making it even harder to clean up after that. Expect a rise in cancer rates among the people of coastal Lebanon.

• Unbelievable ignorance from Hugh Hewitt. That's redundant.

• In another nugget from the conservosphere, they're busy figuring out which members of their community represent which Lord of the Rings character while we keep winning elections. Hey, if you can't gloat today, when can you?

• The White House was surprised by Castro's illness and transfer of power. Are they on top of anything? Meanwhile, it looks like that won't be much of a power transfer. I hope the Cuban people will get self-determination someday.

• Here's a guy you don't want on your side in any debate. Pat Robertson has gone from God sending hurricanes to the wicked, to greenhouse gas emmissions sending them:

"We really need to address the burning of fossil fuels," Robertson said on his "700 Club" broadcast. "It is getting hotter, and the icecaps are melting and there is a buildup of carbon dioxide in the air."

This week the heat index, the perceived temperature based on both air temperatures and humidity, reached 115 Fahrenheit in some regions of the U.S. East Coast. The 76-year-old Robertson told viewers that was "the most convincing evidence I've seen on global warming in a long time."

The guy looks at his temperature gauge, and he's convinced? What a scientific mind.

Can we give him back to the anti-global warming crowd?

• An actual scientist gives his views on global warming and what is needed, although I agree that there's a lot of climate porn out there. I know, I worked on one of them, although it was a little more sober and realistic. We do need an Apollo project for energy, for so many reasons besides global warming.

• Is Jim Webb a 21st-century Theodore Roosevelt?

So many similarities exist between Roosevelt and Webb that it's almost uncanny. Most obvious, both men served heroically in the military, T.R. as leader of the Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War and Webb as a decorated Marine in Vietnam.

After combat, Webb served as secretary of the Navy, T.R. as assistant secretary. And each chose to bolt from a Republican Party he felt had lost its bearing.

Roosevelt, a former two-term Republican president, denounced the GOP as corrupt, stormed out of the 1912 convention and ran for president as a Progressive.

Webb, after serving in the Reagan administration and supporting George W. Bush and George Allen in 2000, left the Republican Party after the invasion of Iraq because, he said, the party had "gone crazy."

Roosevelt was a well-known outdoorsman, and Webb has been spotted at times this summer, in the midst of a grueling campaign, backpacking alone in the mountains of Southwest Virginia. And both men were fighters, literally: Roosevelt began boxing at age 4, while Webb, whose campaign uses the slogan "Born Fighting," was on the varsity boxing squad at the Naval Academy.

I think Jim Webb is a real sleeper in Virginia. And it's interesting that Ned Lamont, on ABC, called Teddy Roosevelt his political hero.

• Hey look, an Indonesian province has instituted Islamic law! Freedom IS on the march!