Better Living through Blogging

Being a blogger and all, I feel funny admitting this, but I hate falling into the "blog reading" trap. Basically, instead of hitting the newswires and other strictly media sites, I have read only blogs this morning. And I feel like I'm wasting time, because I'm trolling through links that other people have already found, when I should be doing some blogging of my own. I feel better informed about the news when I hit the wires first, then hit the blogs when time allows. But, tonight I've done things backwards, so I'll post some links I like from elsewhere. Unfortunately, since I've also been rather lazy tonight, there won't be many links. (I'm just striking out all over the place, eh?)

Pinko Feminist Hellcat comments on atrocities befallen upon women in the Abu Ghraib scandal.

Khamas and two other human rights workers have all said separately that three young rural women from the Sunni Muslim region of Al-Anbar, west of Baghdad, had been killed by their families after coming out of Abu Ghraib pregnant, Middle East Online reported.

Over at the American Street, Digby can't believe that people could even ponder whether or not torture should be condoned.

Here we have a "working group" of government lawyers tasked to find out what, if any, legal obstacles there are to presidential orders to torture prisoners in the war on terrorism. They found that the president of the United States has the unlimited power to set aside the laws of the land within his capacity as commander in chief. As has been noted by others, this general idea was explicit in the Nazi Fuehrerprinzip and is implied in what Republican legal theorists similarly like to call the "unitary executive." The American government has, up to now, never openly embraced such a concept.

Still on the loely topic of torture, Kevin Drum wonders if the Abu Ghraib scandal is about to explode.

Is the Abu Ghraib scandal about to break wide open? John Abizaid, the CENTCOM commander, is planning to appoint a 4-star general to head up the Army's investigation...

This is potentially devastating for Bush. First, you have the possibility of high-ranking culpability, which is bad enough. But second, you have the recent leak of memos showing that even if Bush didn't personally approve the torture, he certainly presided over a culture that was doing its best to justify it as a routine exigency of war.

Atrios points to rather obvious hypocrisy in the media.

Newsweek wasn't alone. When the Iran-Contra scandal broke (exposed by a Lebanese newspaper, not an American one), newspaper editors and TV anchors around the country -- including CBS's Rather -- cautioned their staffs not to repeat the "excesses" and "mistakes" of the Watergate era, according to a Dec. 5, 1986, article in the New York Times. It was almost as if news executives were demanding passive and restrained reporting.

In a previous post, I made a passing comment to a story about women making 74 cents for every dollar a man earns. Wrong. Feministe has some updated information that paints a more bleak picture.

What they found was nothing like a closing of the pay gap to 77 percent. Over that period, women on average earned only 38 percent of what men did. Adding it up, the researchers found that the average woman earned $273,592 over 15 years, compared with $722,693 for men (in 1999 dollars).