The Rest Of The Week In Review

OK, so I'm boarding a plane at this hour and will be back East for the next week for Thanksgiving. Posting will be light, as my time and access will be limited. So I thought I would just clear out the attic, as I'll be missing a whole heck of a lot next week.

• I wouldn't get too excited over this lawsuit where Dick Cheney and Alberto Gonzales were indicted in Texas for prisoner abuse in federal detention centers. The prosecutor in the case has a, er, checkered past, and during the first hearing on the subject he yelled at the judge and asked him to recuse himself. It just doesn't look like the most promising legal proceeding. Meanwhile, if this does go to trial, will taxpayers be paying for Gonzales' defense the way they're paying now for a private attorney defending him against possible charges arising from his mangling of the Justice Department?

• The LA Times has decided that potential Attorney General nominee Eric Holder is "haunted" by the Marc Rich pardon. This despite his tangential (at best) role in the incident and the complete lack of public fallout over it. Eric Boehlert deconstructs this one. This is a made-up GOP myth.

• For more from Boehlert, check out this fantastic essay on the media's double standard in covering new Presidents. They turned skeptical and combative with Obama after not doing so with Bush; they got angry at the lack of leaks in Clinton's transition, pleased with the lack of leaks under Bush's "professional" transition, and now angry yet again at the leak-filled Obama transition (some of those leaks strategic, by the way, some not).

• Looks like no big move to repeal don't ask don't tell early in Obama's term. That's fine, but this was a campaign promise, so he'd better get to it at some point.

• I don't buy for a second that conservatives will shift their focus to abortion reduction from banning. They have made a cottage industry off of their Roe rhetoric, they can't afford to go back now, morally or financially.

• The future of safety and stability in Afghanistan could be in pomegranates. One thing that country needs desperately is another export crop beyond poppies, to break the back of the militants making a fortune off the drug trade. You're not going to completely stamp it out, but giving farmers an alternative at least can siphon off a healthy chunk of the market. The US-funded pomegranate initiative is priced at $12 million. They ought to double it.

• Robert Farley on Obama and missile defense, and how Russia's posturing will make it harder for the President-elect to scrap the program.

• Coal is not the answer. It's about time we saw some progressive pushback on this pernicious industry.

• So some Verizon staffers breached Barack Obama's privacy and started snooping around in his cell phone records. Yet another reason I don't have Verizon. The workers were fired, however. Maybe Obama might rethink the whole "retroactive immunity for the telecoms" having been on the other end of it.

• You cannot possibly read this story from Forbes Magazine, of all places, and then think that America has "the best health care in the world," as conservatives are wont to say. This is sickening. What this really shows is that we need a British-style NHS, which is sadly not on the table right now.

• I would love to hear an explanation to the phenomenon of low Election Day turnout for Obama in Chicago's black wards, including many he represented as a state Senator.

• I've checked out of the Fannie/Freddie debate with Marc Danziger, but I thought I'd mention that he's not the only person in the world with charts about this. Here are some from Mark Thoma (h/t The Nobelist), showing that asset-backed securities issuers essentially drove the housing bubble, and the GSE's scaled back from 2003 onward, precisely the beginning of the bubble.

• If you're into graphic design, or just were amazed by the Obama campaign's exquisite use of graphical branding, this is a must-read interview with Sol Sender, who created the "O" logo. His achievement will be studied in political circles for decades.

• And finally, I actually want to see the indie po-mo flick "JCVD," but the tape of this interview with Jean-Claude Van Damme, where he starts hitting on the female interviewer mid-stream, might be even more entertaining.