Paul Krugman makes David Brooks look like a fool because Brooks has no idea what he's talking about.

Grisly game theory: can you avoid torture?

Marginal Revolution

Let us say that you have been captured and threatened with torture. You are, for whatever reason, entirely willing to betray the information you hold. Your primary goal is to avoid pain, and perhaps you positively want to squeal. How should you present what you know? I see a few options:

1. Break down immediately, beg for mercy, humiliate yourself, and spill the beans. (If you talk right away, will they torture you anyway? And since no further good information can be offered why should they stop?)

2. Go in acting tough, really tough. At the first sign of serious pain, start crying and switch to strategy #1.

3. Wait until they apply their "best shot" torture, and then talk. They will feel they have done their job and stop.

4. First offer (or make up) compromising information to show your disloyalty to the cause your torturers are fighting. Your confession will then be more credible.

5. Say you don't know anything, try to fight the torture, but break down when you can't stand it any more. You can't fool them, so the best you can do is to actually "go through the wringer." You are stuck in the pooling equilibrium, and trying to deviate only makes you worse off.

Which of these is the most credible signal that you have told all you know? Can you do any better than number five? And how does your best answer depend upon the hypothesized motives of the torturers? Is there anything you can say to the U.S. to avoid being sent out for rendition? I don't see any simple answer here, the question is which behavior your torturers will interpret as an unlikely tactic from a truly determined trickster.

via Ballon-Juice

Sullivan: Here's a question I can't get out of my head. What if Terri Schiavo had had a living will saying she wouldn't want a feeding tube to keep her alive for decades with no reasonable hope for recovery? Legally, of course, there'd be no issue. She'd get her chance to die in peace. But morally? The arguments of the proponents for keeping the feeding tube in indefinitely suggest that removing the tube is simply murder. If that is the case, then how can removing the tube ever be justified - even if she consented in advance? Murder is murder, right? Isn't a "living will" essentially a mandate for future assisted suicide? It seems to me that the logic of the absolutist pro-life advocates means that this should be forbidden too. They should logically support a law which forbids the murder of anyone, regardless of living wills. In a society that legally mandates the "culture of life," the individual's choice for death is irrelevant, no? Or am I missing something here?

You aren't missing anything. If some have their way, living wills will be invalidated:

Theology doesn't matter. Laws don't matter. Your wishes don't matter. Moral obligations are what matters to some of these folks. And before I get flamed, note the terminology Land used- he 'accepts' peoples wishes. If given the opportunity to mandate what he wants, he will. And you are a fool for thinking otherwise.

The Stupid:

Brooks: But then Monday he threw out the first pitch at Nationals Park. Atrocious. I don’t mean to be sexist, but the man throws like a Democrat.

I've heard stupid attack on Democrats before, but "the man throws like a Democrat." WFT does that even mean?

Sorry, I digress. David Brooks is made to look like a fool for an entirely different reason and Matt Taibbi does the honors.

And a h/t goes to Anne Laurie.

Just when I thought things couldn't get any more bizarre today, this gem crossed my Twitter stream, courtesy of Media Matters. Really, some folks ought to think before hitting the "tweet button." From the hatriot Neal Boortz, known as Talkmaster on Twitter, this little pair of gems:

Yes, it really DOES say that. Not content to leave that little bomb in the stream, he followed up with this:

While Media Matters was content to show this insanity with no further comment, I'm not. Small business is better off today than it was under Bush. This is fact. Their taxes are lower, they get an immediate tax credit for providing health benefits to their workers, and they finally get some parity with the big corporations.

Neal Boortz calls himself a libertarian, but he's really just a fool with a big mouth and a microphone.

I wonder if he's ever researched his company's past. If so, he'd know the founder of Cox Radio was Franklin D. Roosevelt's running mate in 1920. FDR would NOT approve, and I somehow believe Mr. Cox would not either.

What is it about having sex with animals that compulsively sticks in right-wingers' heads? It's an obsession with conservatives.

I remember when the freak known as Neal Horsley famously admitted to having sex with farm animals to Alan Colmes a few years ago.

Is it true?" Colmes asked.

"Hey, Alan, if you want to accuse me of having sex when I was a fool, I did everything that crossed my mind that looked like I..."

AC: "You had sex with animals?"

NH: "Absolutely. I was a fool. When you grow up on a farm in Georgia, your first girlfriend is a mule."

AC: "I'm not so sure that that is so."

NH: "You didn't grow up on a farm in Georgia, did you?"

AC: "Are you suggesting that everybody who grows up on a farm in Georgia has a mule as a girlfriend?"

NH: It has historically been the case. You people are so far removed from the reality... Welcome to domestic life on the farm..."

Horsley:You experiment with anything that moves when you are growing up sexually. You're naive. You know better than that... If it's warm and it's damp and it vibrates you might in fact have sex with it."

Newshounds has more.. When Horsley ran for Governor, he also said he'd kill his own son in order for Georgia to secede from the Union as a way of ending abortion in his home state. He's one of those Randall Terry type abortion nuts too.

Then you had Rick Santorum and his "man on dog sex" fantasies. Now we have the teabagger elite known as J.D. Hayworth.

Sen. John McCain's (R-Ariz.) primary challenger, former Arizona congressman J.D. Hayworth, warned this past weekend that the same-sex marriage decision handed down by the Massachusetts Supreme Court is so loose in its logic and wording that it could lead to a man marrying his horse...

James Wolcott writes about it in the only way he knows how.

But I think the voters of Arizona should think twice about a man willing to toss away 2000 years of Judeo-Christian values to mate with a horse. "[If] you really had affection for your horse, I guess you could marry your horse,” he told an interviewer from KORN News. I wonder what Mrs. Hayworth thinks of her husband's cavalier attitude about the sanctity of marriage, his willingness to cast it and her aside if the right pony came along that he could make his horse-wife. "A devoted family man, J.D. is happily married to Mary, and they are blessed with 3 children, Nicole , Hannah, and John Micah." Oh sure, now they are blessed; but if J. D. Hayworth insists on giving in to his affections, he may eventually be the proud sire of a second set of children named Flicka, Pegasus, and Phar Lap, whose glossy manes would be the envy of their classmates but would make any future candidacy "problematic," even in a Palinized Republican Party barely distinguishable from your average freak show.

We should keep a list of all animal-sex-loving-Republicans for CNN, don't you think?

Having gays not be afraid to openly talk about themselves is really freaking out the conservative movement. Don't you remember when anything that a military leader said was sacrosanct when a Republican was president? That doesn't count anymore.

Duncan Hunter makes a fool of himself on NPR, and although the host didn't point out the flaw in his argument, she just repeated his words back to him as if saying, "Is this guy kidding me?"

Hunter: No, because I think it's bad for the cohesiveness and the unity in the military especially those that are in close combat, close quarters in country right now, it's not the time to do it. I think the military is not civilian and I think the folks that have been in the military in very close situations with each other, there has to be a special bond there and I think that bond is broken.

If you open up the military to transgenders, to hermaphrodites to gays and lesbians.

Host: Transgenders and hermaphrodites?

Yea, that's going to be part of this thing. It's not just gays an lesbians, it's this whole thing.

My GOD, where's Rick "man on dog" Santorum when you need him? Pretty soon the entire military will be banging cats and dogs and soon will be trying to marry their pets.

For conservatives, it's never the time to do anything. And you know just being next to teh Gay will rub off on the next soldier and he may want to just start making out as heavy artillery falls. That could happen, couldn't it? I know James Dobson's BFF Tony Perkins probably thinks so.

Pam's House Blend has more.

It looks like Arlen Specter is coming to terms with the cold reality that he can't be a "Democrat" and stand in opposition to working families. As usual, the Republican-like Ben Nelson does as much damage as he can to good progressive legislation like EFCA.

“Card Check” deal is a “fool’s errand”Sen Ben Nelson, D-NE, told me he does not see a deal happening this year at all. He sees no way to put a compromise together that’s pallatable. “You take away the arbitration issue, and you still have the ‘card check’, so that doesn’t work. You take away the ‘card check’ and you still have the arbitration problem. And if both go away, you’re left with nothing. It’s a fool’s errand to do this. I just don’t see an agreement happening,” Nelson said.

Way to go, Ben! That's acting like a good FOX News Democrat. But as soon as this report comes out, there's news of a compromise in the works with Specter being part of the solution.

Feinstein, Specter Compromises Pave the Way For Passage of Employee Free Choice Act

New compromise measures from Dianne Feinstein and Arlen Specter may pave the way for the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA).

As Harkin says, the Feinstein compromise has the advantage of "protecting the secret ballot, so people can do it in private," which neutralizes that particular right-wing criticism of the bill.

The other bone of contention has been arbitration clause of the Employee Free Choice Act. Specter himself supports "last best offer" arbitration. It's also called "baseball arbitration," and has incentives to get both parties to quickly make their best, most reasonable offer. Bill Samuel of the AFL-CIO says "we're open to that."...read on

I'm tired of hearing excuses and I'm tired of Democrats like Ben Nelson and Evan Bayh that block real change in America.

While talking about RNC Chairman Mike Duncan's promise to go negative on Barack Obama Thursday night on "Verdict," conservative dinosaur Pat Buchanan made the astute observation that the GOP's only shot at winning this year is to trash Obama for his "associations" with controversial figures, and raise doubts among the electorate about choosing an "exotic" (code word for black) guy. Luckily, Tanya Acker was there to call him out on it right away and make him look like the racist "exotic" fool that he is. Buchanan's stammering definition of exotic is equally as absurd.

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Buchanan: The only way the Republicans can win this -- when everyone wants to throw the Republicans out -- is to raise questions, raise doubts about the alternative. They're gonna use his associations, and they're gonna use his statements, his elitism, they're gonna use the fact that hes exotic. That's what's gonna happen.

Acker: Exotic? What does exotic mean? Is exotic code for black? I dont understand what exotic means.

It's pretty fascinating to watch someone like Pat Buchanan opine on the 2008 Presidential race with Barack Obama as the Democratic nominee. It's almost seems at times like Pat is living in a different country, in a different era. One which doesn't resemble 21st century America, and one in which he undoubtedly would feel more comfortable.

BBC: (h/t miss kitty)

At least 1,000 residents of the central Somali town of Dusamareb have held a protest against a deadly US attack.

The missile strike on Thursday killed the leader of a group which the US links to al-Qaeda. At least 10 others died when a house in the town was hit.

One of the protest organisers said people feared further strikes by US forces on the town.[..]

In Dusamareb, people protested against Thursday's US strike, shouting slogans such as "Down with the Bush administration".

One of the organisers, Abdirasak Moalim Ahmed, told the Associated Press news agency: "Our town has been severely affected by the recent US attack and still we fear because planes continue to fly over our city."[..]

Al-Shabab, which the US says is linked with al-Qaeda, controls parts of central and southern Somalia.

The group says it is a purely Somali movement and denies involvement with al-Qaeda.

Is anyone else suspicious of the ease in which the Bush administration paints any and all Islamist movements under the umbrella of "al Qaeda"? Fool the American people once, shame on you. Try to fool the American people over and over and over....