text: Denver officials say the White House prematurely announced that Denver was adopting Baghdad as a sister city.
  City officials and members of the Denver Regional Council of Governments were caught off-guard by a news release announcing the partnership Wednesday.
  The White House promised that Denver -- which faces a possible $33 million budget shortfall in 2005 -- will give Baghdad "humanitarian assistance" and "other aid initiatives."
  Steve G. has some more on advertising on blogs. Let me add first that my earlier post on this was limited to the wisdom of candidates spending their advertising dollars on blogs.
  But, more generally, from what a few correspondents who know have told me in email, my (and Kos's and Kevin Drum's and Instapundit's) ad rates are still at the low low end of the range. My ad rates bounce around quite a bit (I lower them when the number drops and raise them again when it raises), but currently my most expensive ad goes for $800 for a week (top left premium ad). This site has gotten 717,413 page views in the past week, meaning that the cost per thousand impressions (CPM) is just over a dollar. For a standard ad, which usual goes for about $200/week, that falls to a quarter CPM.
  I know little about advertising and won't speculate on the effectiveness of any form of advertising, but from what people have told me that's at the low end and lower than the going rate.
  Let me also add that there is an important distinction between the question of whether or not torture is a "good" or "bad" thing conceptually and the legality of its implementation and the appropriateness of Justice Department personnel putting out memos explaining the best way for the administration to get away with clearly violating the law. Yglesias illustrates that basic point here, and Eric Muller has more.
  These people who set about legalizing inhumane behavior on behalf of a president on whom they confer absolute power to order it at will are as shallow and evil as the cliché spouting president who demanded it. The slippery slope to totalitarianism started in a conference room where coffee and donuts and microsoft power point presentations on torture and pain were on the agenda one morning.
  I'm not a lawyer so I often hesitate before treading into explicitly legal grounds, but there's something which has been bugging me for some time so I'll just throw it out there.
  In the recent hearings, Rumsfeld kept trying to make this fine distinction between "abuse" of prisoners and "torture" of prisoners. In much of the commentary about that, it was as if people were interpreting this to be a matter of severity or degree. That is, if you "hurt someone a little bit" we call that "abuse" as opposed "hurting someone a lot" which we call "torture."
  But, that really isn't the conceptual or legal distinction between torture and abuse (I'm not sure if "prisoner abuse" has a real legal definition, so this is a bit murky.) The distinction between torture and abuse is one of intent.
  If I'm a prison guard and I, for no good reason, beat the crap out of a prisoner then no matter what the severity of the beating I would not be guilty of "torture." If anyone cares and there happens to be video tape and the prisoner's lawyer gets his/her hands on it, I might find myself getting charged with some form of assault.
  What would make that beating torture is if I were doing it to elicit information. From my reading of the various statutes, treaties, etc..., even fairly mild forms of "abuse" are considered to be torture, if the purpose of the activity is to elicit information.
  There are a couple of reasons we take (or, at least we did until Bushco got in) such a strong legal stand against torture. The first is one people regularly discuss -- the basic Geneva Convention principle which is in place to a great degree to protect our soldiers.
  But, aside from that it also gets at the heart of our entire system of justice -- the right against self-incrimination, innocent until proven guilty, no cruel and unusual punishment.
  At this point, only morons with limited intellectual capacity bring up the "ticking time bomb" scenario as a justification. In that situation, we'd all do whatever had to be done no matter what the law said and when we saved the planet we'd be pardoned and declared heroes. This isn't what has been going on in Iraq and Gitmo.
  Most prisoners in Iraq were innocent of anything and subsequently let go. Some have been on TV talking about it.