It's been eight months and it's time for a review. Let's see what we have so far:

• Torture was formerly illegal, but now he claims to have made it more illegal, except that if you did it anyway you won't be prosecuted.

Influenced by a $2.6B aid package, and clearly feeling chastised by our President's tough love speech in Cairo, our allies reform their ways and moderate their rhetoric:

Housing Minister: Spread of Arab population must be stopped

A mosque was bombed yesterday in Zahedan, Iran, with a count of 24 dead and 125 injured so far. A second bomb was successfully defused a few minutes after the first blast. The city is near the Pakistan/Afghanistan border, and one worries that the Iranians might use it as a justification to cross over the border(s) and engage in some counter-insurgency of their own. However, this is how it's being reported there now:

Press TV

Maybe a whole diary is an overreaction to an offhand piece of humor by PM:

but it seems a bit of an unfair label, considering the long list of real offenses that could cited, and which make George W. Bush a strong candidate for worst president ever. Surrounding himself with an unusual number of WASPs or even Texans is actually not on the list.

Both John McCain and Barack Obama missed the filing deadline to be on the ballot in Texas. Obama's people missed it outright by a whole day, and with a likely false affidavit. McCain's people got something in on time, but without a name for the VP candidate as required by law. Palin's name was a full 3 days late.

Since Wagster gets to write about his neighborhood, I'll write about mine - Edinburg, in the Rio Grande Valley (really a delta) of Texas.

We're south of the line of Border Patrol checkpoints placed on each highway leaving the Valley, about 60 miles from the border. The checkpoints aren't particularly bad, I've only had minor trouble three times in maybe 200 crossings, and the pants stayed on all three times. The trick is to use the word "Sir" exactly once in each sentence when talking to the officers (twice might sound sarcastic).

From the BBC via Unqualified Offerings:

This is in response to Brendanm98's diary, which laid out a case using admirable restraint. However, this diary also address some of the less respectable exaggeration and misquotes floating around, which he properly refrained from using.

It's divided into four pieces: the moral case, the practical case regarding effects on Iran itself, the practical case in terms of military consequences, and of course the nukes. I don't make much distinction between agressive confrontatin, actual aerial attack, and a full-up ground war, because, as discussed below, once it starts it's not entirely under our control.

Recently, as part of the immigration debate, there's been an increase in arguments against birthright citizenship (see for example this and this), and also a good amount of debate about what we are looking for in new immigrants: high-level skills vs. willingness to get their hands dirty vs. the right values and culture vs. nonexistence.

The hypothetical question is this: suppose at some time in the future the birthright citizenship clause of the 14th amendment is repealed. In the ensuing confusion about what to do next, we throw our hands up in the air, and decide to start from scratch: we revoke the citizenship of everyone. Everyone has 30 days maximum to show up before a Citizenship Review Board and make their case why they should be allowed to stay. The Boards issue some guidelines for preparing your argument: (a) Don't bother telling us where you were born - that's exactly what we repealed. (b) No nonsense about who your mother was - her citizenship's been revoked too, along with all the rest of your ancestors.

There's a movement to resurrect the Equal Rights Amendment:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/27/AR2007032702357.html?nav=rss_politics

and a discussion about it going on over at Obsidian Wings. For those of you not old enough to remember, the key part goes as follows

While I favor the sentiment being expressed, I'm old enough to remember some serious problems with the way the ERA was sold the first time around.