Blogging is to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.

When Bush says that Abu Ghraib was the work of a few, he forgot to mention that he was one of them.

You just have to keep going. I mean I think our job, my job, is to keep articulating that I exist and that there are lots of people like me exist and we just have no home.

When you fuse Christianity with power, it isn't long before Christians start imposing the cross on others rather than taking it up for themselves.

The simple truth is that there isn't a single civil right I would deny to an evangelical Christian. I've defended their freedom of religion, of association, of disassociation, and believe they should be treated with respect. I wouldn't dream of drumming them out of the military, firing them for their faith, tearing up their relationships, or taking their children away from them. The favor, alas, is not returned.

A mind is a wonderful thing to change.

That's what torture does: it creates a miasma of unknowing, about as dangerous a situation in wartime as one can imagine. This hideous fate was made possible by an inexperienced president with a fundamentalist psyche and a paranoid and power-hungry vice-president who decided to embrace "the dark side" almost as soon as the second tower fell, and who is still trying to avenge Nixon. Until they are both gone from office, we are in grave danger the kind of danger that only torturers and fantasists and a security strategy based on coerced evidence can conjure up.