In lieu of real content, a pointer to excellent things you'd already know about if you were sensible and had picked up my blogroll.

As if directorship of the North Country Academy for the Excruciatingly Fine Arts were not enough, Rob Helpy-Chalk has been on fire lately. Here's a backgrounder on the Military Commissions Act (aka the We'll Torture Anyone We Damn Well Please" Act), followed up with lists of the traitorous swine who voted for it (so you can avoid voting for them) and two posts on absentee voting throughout the country (viz, how to vote the way you want to, instead of the way Diebold wants you to). Here's another backgrounder, this time on torture methods interrogation techniques, with a particular focus on waterboarding, the adoption of which technique our honorable, humanitarian Puppeteer-in-Chief Vice President calls a "no brainer".

All of this is part of Rob's activities with Save Our Constitution, an SLU campus organization devoted to pushing back against the Bush Junta's efforts to gut the US Constitution, the model and gold standard for representative democracy everywhere and one of the principal reasons I still intend to become a US citizen. Next week they are sponsoring a "teach-in", a four-hour seminar on The Constitution, Human Rights, and the War on Terrorism:

Schedule of Events

Welcome Remarks
Noon: Natalia Singer (Department of English)

The Military Commissions Act
12:10: Eve Stoddard (Department of Global Studies)

12:25 - 1:10 -- Panel 1 -- Erosion of the Constitution, Moderator: Eve Stoddard

1:15 - 2:15 -- Panel 2 -- Torture and International Law, Moderator: Rob Loftis

2:20 - 3:15 -- Panel 3 -- Language, Rhetoric, Politics of Fear, Moderator: Gus diZerega

3:20 - 4:00 -- Wrap-up -- What You Can Do, Moderators: Natalia Singer and Jon Cardinal

Damn, people, this is what universities are for! This is what "public intellectual" means -- or should mean.