Davison online

So it turns out that versus the status quo, the just-passed Senate health bill saves $132 billion over the next 10 years according to the independent Congressional Budget Office (CBO). (You can read the report here.) It also covers 31 million more Americans than the status quo. If true, the GOP deficit hawks—amazingly silent while Bush was in...

While I'm generally in favor of people exercising their First Amendment rights—it typically yields good comedy when it comes from the political arena—it's hard to take seriously the folks (aka "Tea baggers") showing up today in Washington D.C. Yes, it stinks to lose a presidential election. Welcome to the Democrats version of Hell, 2000-2008. It's fine...

This was a heckuva a way to acquire a cool nickname: I passed out during a bout with the flu last Sunday. I've passed out--that sounds a lot more macho than "fainted," or God forbid, "got the vapors"--twice in my life. Both times I awoke slowly, enveloped in a warm, cozy, sleepy happiness. Assuming you don't clock yourself on a table or something on the...

Perhaps the best foreign policy speech I've ever read.

Worth your time: He's also got a book, The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life.

Daniel Larison of The American Conservative shares my "sheer amazement" at the defenders of torture in Torture And War.

...the GOP and the right-wing Christianists have endorsed the methods of the Nazis, the Communist Chinese, and the Stalin-era Soviet Union. That there is some bedfellows, and it tells the rest of us all we need to know when it comes time to vote.

After years of lies, it is now incontrovertible that the US employed torture in it's so-called "war on terror." I am stunned that there would be defenders of this coverup, and I am frankly appalled that many who I otherwise respect are so blasé about the situation. Let me be clear: Watergate is NOTHING compared to this. NOTHING. We...

Although you can argue about the overall justice of the verdicts, the Nuremberg Nazi trials established this legal principle for Western Civilization: "The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him."...

The University of Portland's newspaper, The Beacon, published an article last week about the death of a student at the school. Their choice of headlines: "Suicide claims UP senior" got the newspaper pulled by university administrators. By all accounts, it was the headline not the article that got the newspaper pulled. Indeed, the article itself describes...