"Thanks for the update.  One question.  How is the Nexus One as a . . . uh. . . phone?  The iPhone does a poor job of holding a signal.  Nexus One?"

Vendors are starting to offer a variety of accessories for the Nexus One.  Here are some of them:

• Google:  Go to google.com/phone and click on Get Phone.  That's where you'll find our desktop dock.  While the phone is charging in the dock it shows local time and gives you quick access to weather, alarm settings, photo slideshows, and music.  There's also a jack for connecting to your stereo.  Coming soon: spare batteries (the Nexus One has removable batteries!), and a car docking station.  
• GelaSkins Mobile Art:  These are all very stylish skins and of high quality, although those of us who have tried GelaSkins have preferred to skin just the back of the phone and to leave the front of the Nexus One skinless.  
• Skinit:  For a wider variety of skins, including professional and college sports team themes.
• Accessory Geeks, Handheld Items, Techie Warehouse, CheapNexusOne: Try the crystal silicone case which is offered by several vendors, not the rubber ones (the quality doesn't match that of the phone).  Chargers are also available from these merchants, but be careful to choose a micro-USB charger.  If you need to use the phone on your next dive, try the waterproof box.
• Seidio:  For more traditional cell phone holsters and leather cases. Seidio carries a spare battery (which isn't available from Google yet).  It also just started shipping a battery which it claims has double the life of the standard battery, but this requires a different back on the phone which makes it much bulkier.  We haven't tested the extended life battery yet.    
• Expansys-usa.com, Walmart.com or Amazon.com:  Good options for larger micro-SD flash cards.  The Nexus One comes with a 4GB card, but you can buy 8GB or 16GB cards for more storage for your photos and videos.  We expect 32GB micro-SD cards to be broadly available in the market soon.
  

"I realized a year or two ago where the race for the hoppiest was leading.  We seem to have settled into a characteristic American microbrew style being an IPA with huge amounts of hops.  I like a hoppy brew as much as the next guy, but frankly, this is getting boring.  Where I used to browse the microbrew cases like a kid in a candy store, now I spend my time looking for something more interesting than yet another IPA with excessive hops for the sake of excessive hops."

"If you like hops, and happen to find yourself in Ft. Collins, CO, I had an American Pale Ale at the bar at Coopersmiths where they actually put a little tea bag of hops in the glass.  Was pretty good.  (Like all their beers.)"

1) Searchable PDFs. The huge PDF versions of the Office of Professional Responsibility report condemning John Yoo and Jay Bybee, and David Margolis' memo overruling the OPR recommendations, had the disadvantage of being image files only. You couldn't search by keyword -- for instance, "organ failure." Searchable versions of both of these reports, along with many other torture-memo-related documents, are now available here. These allow you to determine quickly that discussion of the Yoo/Bybee "organ failure" standard (for what constitutes torture) occurs at 14 points in the OPR report. Thanks to reader MC for the tip, and to the creator of the searchable-PDF site, who is a commenter at Marcy Wheeler's ongoing discussion of OPR and related info.

"I disagree with your reading of the Margolis memo.  It's true that he argues that the period after 9/11 was a different time, and that normal standards about caution might therefore not apply.  But that is far from his main point.  Rather, his point is that the OPR report doesn't even *have* a consistent standard---the very rule under which it finds Yoo and Bybee guilty of misconduct requires them to have intentionally or recklessly violated a known, unambiguous obligation or standard, and OPR never quite manages to identify such a standard, let alone to defend it.

"In fact, in the original drafts which OPR was prepared to release to the public in early 2009, the report failed to even mention the office's own analytical framework for professional misconduct.  It tacked on that analysis after criticisms from Yoo and Bybee themselves, without changing the conclusions, giving a disturbing impression of exactly the practice the report argues Yoo and Bybee engaged in: fitting the arguments to the conclusion rather than vice versa.  This is not the performance that those of us were looking for who had hoped for some professional consequence to fall upon at least a few of those who squandered our nation's moral standing and made our leaders liars when they declare before the world that America does not torture."

I agree with this reader that the "no established standards" argument was an important part of Margolis' case. But on re-reading the (searchable!) version of the memo, I'm still struck by the same thing I originally mentioned: how much of his analysis depends on the political/cultural assessment that in the months after 9/11, normal standards of judgment were suspended. Read and decide for yourself.

"I have not read the OPR report and will not argue with your conclusions.  But I do find disconcerting and disconnected this outrage with torture and the quiet and evidently total acceptance of drone attacks in non combatant areas that result in civilian deaths.  As set forth by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker and a few articles by others, it appears indisputable such drone attacks have killed over 500 civilians including women and children.  All attacks were cleared by a lawyer. Should the judgment of these lawyers be held accountable?  Evidently not, since these attacks are applauded as a great success and heralded by the Obama Administration.

"As onerous as torture is, the tactics of drone attacks killing civilians in non combatant areas and the bombing of Hiroshima seem to have more in common than a comparison of torture to Hiroshima.

"I find this acceptance of the drone civilian deaths quietly accepted while a mistake by a 19 year old soldier in attacking a compound where he believes there to be an enemy is subject to a court martial as well as roundly condemned to be confounding."

"One can only hope that the OPR report makes the same splash that Hersey's Hiroshima did,  and that like Hiroshima (which wasn't published in Japan until 1949, but sold very well once the U.S. authorities permitted its release) it eventually gets read in places which were the targets of U.S. policy.   That said,  it might also be worth noting that Hiroshima's reception in the U.S.  has a complicated legacy. Yes, the book confronted the U.S. public with unforgettable imagery of the devastation and human suffering caused by the atomic bombs, and perhaps for the first time forced readers in the U.S. to consider the Japanese victims as people not unlike themselves.  Hersey's choice of middle-class, well-educated Japanese as representatives of the larger public helped in this regard; that so many of the victims in his book were Christian was also a factor.  In other words, Hiroshima's effectiveness at provoking sympathy for the Japanese victims of the bombs was in part a function of its ability to also make Americans think of themselves as potential victims.  I wonder if readers of the OPR report will be able to make that leap from the suffering inflicted on the victims of Bybee and Yoo to their own circumstances.

"Second, Hersey's piece almost certainly helped provoke Stimson's February 1947 Harper's article, "The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb." Concerned about the growing public sentiment in opposition to atomic weapons in general, if not to their use against the inhabitants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,  Stimson was persuaded to help construct what would appear to be a definitive, insider's account of the decision-making process leading up to the bombings.   His description of the decision to use the weapons as having been weighed against the estimated cost of an invasion, and his portrayal of the decision-making process itself as deliberate,  careful and morally upright, had the desired effect. It would be more than a decade before that narrative was effectively challenged, and historians continue to struggle against the the argument that the bombs saved a "million American lives."

"While I don't see Margolis as comparable to Stimson - who knew that the decision-making process he described was a fiction - I do wonder which narrative will emerge out of these early histories of the dark Bush years.  Will it be one which closes the door on continued engagement with the costs of torture, or one which treats such engagement as without merit?"

"You wrote about "the Dick Cheney view, the 24 view, which equates the torture memos with Abraham Lincoln's imposition of martial law."

"Dick Cheney is not merely arguing to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, but is also arguing to torture people held under that standard, and he's advocating it whether or not there's an imminent threat of attack. Lincoln was shot down by the Court when he held would-be saboteurs in Indiana in 1864 because Indiana was not facing an immediate threat. The Court found martial law illegal in Hawaii in 1944 because the state was not under an immediate threat of attack.

"I think both of those examples are fairly analogous to the threat posed by terrorism today. There was certainly the chance of a surprise attack against Hawaii at that time or sabotage in either Indiana or Hawaii at either time. There's a chance that a terrorist affiliated with a terrorist suspect in our custody can attack at any time, anywhere.

"So, Cheney's matching Lincoln and going further than Lincoln in two ways... Cheney's position is equivalent to saying that, since Hiroshima was necessary, the atom bomb should be our first resort in any international conflict." [My emphasis]

"[T] Senate should reform a practice increasingly abused by both parties, the filibuster. Historically, the filibuster was employed to ensure that momentous issues receive a full and fair hearing. Instead, it has come to serve the exact opposite purpose -- to prevent the Senate from even conducting routine business.

"Last fall, the Senate had to overcome two successive filibusters to pass a bill to provide millions of Americans with extended unemployment insurance. There was no opposition to the bill; it passed on a 98-0 vote. But some senators saw political advantage in drawing out debate, thus preventing the Senate from addressing other pressing matters....

"[F]ilibusters should require 35 senators to sign a public petition and make a commitment to continually debate an issue in reality, not just in theory. Those who obstruct the Senate should pay a price in public notoriety and physical exhaustion. That would lead to a significant decline in frivolous filibusters."

"U.S. elections are organized in such a way that each lawmaker gets powerful incentives to act against the public interest. To begin with, a typical member of Congress can win reelection just by convincing a majority of his or her district's voters that the other party is more untrustworthy, incompetent or corrupt than his own. And any politician knows how to make that case in graphic terms that voters can easily grasp.

"Voters today have equally perverse incentives. That is, in each congressional district, every voter -- every young single, middle- aged parent, senior citizen, truck driver, teacher, salesperson, lawyer, business owner, conservative, liberal and moderate -- has to share the same representative. These diverse groups of district residents have distinct -- often opposing -- needs, values and political beliefs.... So, if a member of Congress advocates a detailed solution to a controversial issue, several large blocs of voters in his or her district are likely to oppose his stand, perhaps even enough to want to throw him out of office. The typical lawmaker therefore avoids proposing real solutions to the most controversial issues.

"The members of Congress have found that there are far safer ways to stay in office [than dealing with the nation's real problems]. The safest tactics include:

"1) Reducing hard issues to simple slogans.
"2) Passing measures that seem to address major problems but which put off the hard decisions into the future.
"3) Blaming the country's direst problems on the other political party.

"These strategies succeed so often because of how congressional elections are organized today. Typically, one Republican competes against one Democrat for each district's House seat. Any lawmaker can therefore stay in office just by convincing most voters that the other party is more incompetent than his own."

"Fortunately, the Constitution doesn't require that members of the House represent districts. The Constitution doesn't even mention districts. It lets each state decide how to elect its own Representatives, with Congress having the right to supersede the states' decisions."

"Despite the regime's censorship, [such protests] boost the sagging morale of those in mainland China who hope for freedom and due process of law, as the country's beleaguered rights lawyers and activists emphasise [sic -- Cohen is American but the SCMP is in Hong Kong!]. Moreover, they give the world a fuller picture of contemporary China than that provided by the Olympics, the Confucius Institutes that the government has established abroad and its mind- boggling economic accomplishments. China's quest for "soft power" - international influence based on more than military and economic coercion - will always be frustrated as long as there are continuing foreign protests against abuses suffered by dissidents, religious figures, criminal defence lawyers and others.

"Finally, if stated with requisite humility, public reaffirmation of the basic human decencies that every government should accord its own citizens as well as foreigners reminds all countries, including the US, of the importance of practising what we preach to China."

"When Jimmy Carter was running for president in 1976, he said again and again that America needed "a government as good as its people." Knowing Carter's sometimes acid views on human nature, I thought that was actually a sly barb--and that the imperfect American public had generally ended up with the government we deserve. But now I take his plea at face value. American culture is better than our government. And if we can't fix what's broken [in our system of government], we face a replay of what made the months after the 9/11 attacks so painful: realizing that it was possible to change course and address problems long neglected, and then watching that chance slip away."

"I've been reading the proposed structural fixes to our political system posted in the blog and have been getting exasperated because I know that any proposed structural fix must pass through the same broken political system. That's not going to happen, no matter what the fix is.

"The reason it's not going to happen, imho, is because only the smaller part of our political problems is the gridlock-enabling senate and other governmental institutions. The senate and other institutions have their problems, but other generations have made them work, across a spectrum of political opinion as wide as the current one. The bigger part of our current problems is us, by whom I mean baby boomers like myself--currently (I believe) the largest demographic group of voters and office holders.