has a good short summary of the state of capital punishment in the US and globally following last week’s US Supreme Court decision: An end to killing kids.

South of the border is about a story by Declan McCullagh at News.com: The coming crackdown on blogging. It’s an interview with Bradley Smith, a commissioner of the Federal Election Commission. They’re talking about regulating internet publications under the advertising limits. Very strange.

the most intelligent opinion on the Ward Churchill brouhaha in Colorado belongs to Dahlia Lithwick: Stupidity as a Firing Offense – Why is Bill O’Reilly chairing our faculty meetings? “One hundred percent of the blame for the Churchill debacle rests with the University of Colorado’s board of regents that hired, granted tenure to, and promoted an individual whose scholarship and personal qualifications are now, and must always have been, in serious question.”

Kevin Drum posted a summary of the Sy Hersh article in The New Yorker that I linked to the other day, and very correctly points out that perhaps the most important thing is not that the administration has been looking closely at (and in) Iran. Rather, it is that covert activities in the US have shifted to the Pentagon from the CIA.

Hersh says – with seemingly considerable backup – that the administration has a broad plan to remove covert operations from the CIA and centralize them all in the Pentagon. Why? Because they believe that Pentagon ops are exempt from 70s-era laws that limit covert activities. In other words, no oversight.