"Obama vs. the Phobocracy"

Nebula Award winner Michael Chabon's eloquent February 4th op-ed piece on Barack Obama can be found here, and seems more relevant than ever.

After Too Long, a New Story

A new story by me, "The Rotator," featuring a couple of high-level miscreants, will be out in Future Americas, edited by John Helfers and Martin H. Greenberg for DAW and available for sale on June 3, 2008.

Food

Barbara Fisher, at her food blog Tigers & Strawberries, writes about wasted food and what might be done to keep so much food from being wasted.

An American Hero

Joe Conason writes about Matthew Diaz, "a truth teller who deserves justice," here, at Salon. Conason points out: "What his story shows, once again, is that the durable old stereotype of the military man who yearns for authoritarian rule and brutality is largely false...[Diaz] has proved that the most reliable defenders of the Constitution these days are not in the civilian ranks of government but among the senior military officers. It was the neoconservative law professors and political bureaucrats who authorized, encouraged and justified the worst depredations against human and constitutional rights, from Abu Ghraib to Gitmo. It was the men and women in uniform who warned against those policies and tried to amend them."

Well worth reading, especially after the declassification of John Yoo's evil memo.

What's Going on in Iraq?

Slate's Fred Kaplan discusses the battles in Basra, and Arianna Huffington talks about looking at Iraq through a "glass eye."