It’s appalling, it’s deeply disturbing but we need to look it straight in the face. Journalism professor Mark Danner , writing in the New York Review of Books reports on, and excerpts at length from, a heretofore secret report by the International Red Cross. Danner describes in detail torture administered by Mr. Bush and Mr. Chaney (through their subordinates) in your name and mine. To people.

Sunday’s New York Times reproduced part of the Danner article here and the Washington Post’s snippets appeared Monday here. Read both but the original Danner article, though longer, is essential.

And the Murder? Oh that. Seymour Hersch,  read more »

This is very curious: there's George Bush on my teevee, talking to me. Seriously: when's the last time you've seen this guy? Or heard him say anything? The Olympics? Gustav? Katrina?

George Bush stopped mattering to most Americans right around the time when his disapproval ratings catapulted under 35% (they're now at 19%). People are counting the days and hours until the November election. Some, I'm sure, are counting smaller increments even than that; a friend of mine has a keychain that tells her to the exact second how long it is until Bush gets wheeled away from the West front of the Capitol, after his successor's inaugural.

So to whom exactly did it occur that sending George Bush out in front of the cameras to sell his plan was a good idea? If Bush thinks something - say, a $700 billion pile of free money for Wall Street pigs - is a good idea, doesn't that virtually guarantee universal public rejection, driven as much by spite as experience?

And here you have it, via email from the DNC, George Bush's ringing endorsement of John McSame.

It's like getting endorsed by herpes.

No, that's not a spoof. It's the last audio snippet in John McCain's newest, presumably web-only, television spot.

There's a lot to be embarrassed about if you're a republican, but John McCain seems intent on making that pie higher.

So here we are at the tail end of the disastrous Bush era - 201 days and 14 hours left at this writing - and can start doing damage assessments. Take the economy. Our currency has lost half its value, our government debt has roughly doubled, we have lost millions of manufacturing jobs and replaced them with lower-paying jobs in the service sector, our infrastructure is crumbling, and most importantly, due to a burst asset bubble created by lax regulation in the housing industry that in turn produced a credit bubble, our economy is going to either stay stagnant or contract outright. As The New York Times points out today, this state of affairs is likely to persist until the Fall of 2009. In short, we are fucked.

You'll be hearing apologies for this from conservatives with all the frequency you heard them from Soviet-era apparatchiks, of course. One virtue of being an ideologue is that you're never wrong, no matter how crushing the weight of facts that might indicate otherwise.

So, as some parts of the country are in recession and others lurch into outright depression - Michigan, Ohio and Indiana along with most of the rust belt, for example - it's time to take a sobering look at what the medium-term future may hold for the City of New York.  read more »