The anti-American Taliban extremists are resurgent not only in Afghanistan, where they once sheltered Osama Bin Laden, but also in neighboring Pakistan (which has nuclear weapons) as well. Thousands of Pakistanis are fleeing the Swat Valley, which is dominated by the Taliban.

But the Obama Administration stubbornly refuses to learn from the Bush Administration’s mistakes in Afghanistan. It’s stepping up efforts to wipe out the mainstay of the Afghan economy, by eradicating the opium poppies that Afghan farmers cultivate. Afghans are so…

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My good friend and Bureaucrash ally Xaq Fixx recently altered me to an interesting story on the intersection of politics, technology and free speech. It seems that the state government of California, through the California Employment Training Panel, is paying contractors who train in-state workers in new skills - an effort to boost the Golden State’s notoriously sagging economy. Nothing too unusual there.

Enter SF Weekly’s Matt Smith, who noticed that the list of recipients of this state-subsidized training were employees of Cybernet…

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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wants Bush Administration officials prosecuted for facilitating torture. Fair enough. But if they get prosecuted, she should get prosecuted, too. She knew of the torture and knowingly funded the very programs that engaged in it. She only objected to it after Bush’s poll ratings went down.

Andrew Sullivan, who detests the Bush Administration, observes that “The Speaker was briefed on waterboarding and other torture techniques used by the White House. She was part of the select group of congressmen and women told…

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Many of those bogus orange alerts that inconvenienced and alarmed travelers since 9/11 had an unsavory source: torture. The Bush Administration, with the tacit support of Congressional leaders of both political parties, tortured terrorists and other detainees into confessing imaginary plots. (House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Cal.), who recently called for an investigation of the Bush Administration, herself knew of the torture for years, having received over 30 intelligence briefings, and Congress knowingly funded the precise programs that practiced torture).

“When CIA officials subjected their first…

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