Anywhere the action’s at

We’re blogwatching this and that…

Obsidian Wings: Should have linked to this long ago–series on Maher Arar, the Canadian citizen shipped, with INS complicity, to Syria for torture. I haven’t forgotten this and will SOON (next week) be posting more stuff on his case. Via Body and Soul I think. Excerpt from one post in the series:

“A deportee/victim who is probably innocent* of all wrongdoing, who may have been taken on very flimsy evidence, who was taken from a U.S. airport, who was taken to one of the worst regimes in the world, with the approval of the second highest person in the Justice Department, despite an explicit warning to the government that he would be tortured. It may be that this is an unusual combination, that we usually ‘render’ people captured abroad and people whom we know are guilty, and we usually deport them to Jordan or Egypt or Morocco rather than Syria, and we usually retain some semblance of control over their interrogation. How comforting any of this is is up to you.

“But is also possible that what is unique is not Arar’s fate, but that we know about it. Someone who is a Canadian citizen, who saw a lawyer before he was deported, who had family in the West who intervened forcefully on his behalf, who got out, who was willing and able to hire a lawyer and talk to the press.

“Which is it? I don’t know.”

FactCheck.org–“like Snopes, only just for U.S. politics.” I haven’t checked this out myself, so don’t know to what extent it is itself slanted, but it definitely looks interesting. Via Kesher Talk.

Very good piece by Ron Bailey on Health Savings Accounts. Important issue; just became even more personally relevant to me because my new insurance is through an HSA. Discussion of the piece in comments box here.

Here’s a somewhat confused Goldberg File that does provide a handy-dandy roundup of disappointing decisions by President Bush. Goldberg beats up on “compassionate conservatism,” yay!