Four things I learned today that I'd like to share:

1. Last week, when George W. Bush finally signed the into law the bill that explicitly made it illegal to torture detainees (and how proud we should be for our country that we need a law like this in the first place), he followed up the signing, without any fanfare mind you, by issuing a "signing statement" which indicates how the White House interprets this new law. In this signing statement, Bush indicates that the White House will follow this law within the context of executive branch obligations to protect national security. Legal experts say this is the Bush administration's way of basically saying "We won't torture people unless we really feel we need to." It's bad enough that the White House fought this bill and turned around and praised it after it passed both houses of Congress with veto-proof majorities, but now they've also signed it law while surreptitiously issuing a document that gives them all the exceptions that they unsuccessfully fought for during the whole ugly process.

2. While we're on the subject of Dubya, at a New Year's Day event which involved visiting with wounded veterans at the Amputee Care Center of Brooke Army Medical Center, he followed up some fumbling praise for the medical professionals who work there by talking about the own wound a sustained: a scratch he picked up "in combat with a cedar." He's just visited with soldiers who've lost appendages in Iraq, and he's making small talk jokes and drawing correlations about injuries he sustained dicking around on his ranch. In this case, they actually put video of the event on the White House website so you can see his callous ineptitude using government bandwidth!

3. Representative Robert Ney (R-Ohio), who is the member of Congress most likely to face criminal charges in the ongoing saga of political crook Jack Abramoff, is also one of the cosponsors of the ludicrous 2003 bill that doled out retribution to France by creating the terms "Freedom Fries" and "Freedom Toast." So at least karma's working there.

4. Amidst the parade of ridiculous variations in the Barbie doll line is this version of Ken:



Can't you just hear him say "The horses are restless, and the men are quiet."