Shall we call him “President” Trump?

"You have scorned our intelligence agencies — you tweet “intelligence” in quotes the same way that we should eventually use quotes around the word “president” when it precedes your name — and you have continued your assault on the press.”

See “Donald Trump and the Tainted Presidency”, Charles M. Blow,
New York Times, 2017-01-09.

Coleen Rowley, Iraq War, and good quotes

I sent a note to Coleen Rowley about her op-ed column "Ten Years After Iraq" in today's Star Tribune.  I included a couple of the relevant quotes from Washington's "Farewell Address.  I also went to one of her web pages that included several relevant quotes.  Note that some of them are from well-known Republicans or conservatives like Theodore Roosevelt and Margaret Chase Smith.

Quote of the day: sex is more sinful than killing

"The real scandal is that we're scandalized by sexual escapades, not by the license to kill given to the CIA's drone program." - a paraphrase inserted in bold in "Real spies don't behave like Bond. Or do they?", David Rothkopf, Star Tribune, 2012-11-14, originally published in Foreign Policy as "Shaken, Not Stirred by CIA 'Values'", 2012-11-12.

I just find it amazing that we are willing to upset people's lives to suit our own purposes, whether it is with subpoenas to ransack houses of people we don't like or with drones to demolish houses of people we don't like.

If our government can torture foreigners...

...what's to stop it from torturing us?

Reflection on reading "Torture Retorts" in the New York Times "Opiniator", 2009-04-22.