Steve Gilliard, one of the most passionate voices in the blogosphere about sports and politics, has passed away at the ridiculuously young age of 41. Whether you agreed or disagreed with him, or more likely, agreed and disagreed with him at the same time, you always knew where he stood, as he was utterly fearless and unapologetic in expressing his views. His News Blog was a daily habit for me for the past few years; much like Pauline Kael, I would read him just to find out how he was going to piss me off on whatever the big story of the day was, even though our political views were similar. Anyone who has checked out his site recently knows about his health problems, and his prolonged, agonizing stay at the hospital was the stuff of nightmares. My condolences to his wife Jen, his mother, and the rest of his family. Blogging won't be as much fun without him.

Presented, without passion, prejudice or editorial comment:

It's safe to say that bashing Andrew Sullivan has become a stale endeavor on lefty blogs, evidence in large part by this piece, a brief history of the term "enhanced interrogation techniques." He concludes with this devastating point:

Critics will no doubt say I am accusing the Bush administration of being Hitler. I'm not. There is no comparison between the political system in Germany in 1937 and the U.S. in 2007. What I am reporting is a simple empirical fact: the interrogation methods approved and defended by this president are not new. Many have been used in the past. The very phrase used by the president to describe torture-that-isn't-somehow-torture - "enhanced interrogation techniques" - is a term originally coined by the Nazis. The techniques are indistinguishable. The methods were clearly understood in 1948 as war-crimes. The punishment for them was death.

(h/t via Plotinus) Again, it seems a pity that a workable international tribunal doesn't exist to put the reigning junta on trial after 2009.

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today: That we celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the Beatles' fifth-best album.

If this is what we can expect from the Republican front-runnner, it will be hard not to be overconfident next year.

Blue-eyed soul meets the Osmonds:



There's a local oldies station, KRTH, that plays this song three or four times a day, seemingly, and I still haven't found who the core audience they're trying to appeal to here. But I guess that's why the IPod was invented.