Two days before Christmas, the Associated Press wrote of Halliburton’s generous gift of $250 million to Nigerian officials, to bribe their government into dropping the criminal bribery charges against former Halliburton CEO and former U.S.  Vice President Dick Cheney. Former President George H.W. Bush and former Secretary of State James Baker reportedly also made personal...

We’re living in some nasty times.  Conservatives accuse liberals of empathy, as though it’s a bad thing.  That’s already one of those You-can’t-make-this-shit-up things.  We hear some sane news commentators and saner comics attacking Glenn Beck’s outrage-du-jour.  Everyone to the left of Genghis Kahn has noticed that Faux News has moved beyond car-crash journalism...

Of our unambiguously evil actions, torturing humans or other animals must be among the most egregious.  The UN Geneva Convention on human rights (1975 expanded version) defines torture as:   “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information...