Unca Darrell

APRIL 30 / George Friedman on torture

ON THE SCALE of human cruelty, these actions do not rise anywhere near the top. At the same time, anyone who thinks that being placed without food in a freezing cell subject to random mild beatings -- all while being told that your family might be joining you -- isn't agonizing clearly lacks imagination. The treatment of detainees could have been worse. It was terrible nonetheless.

APRIL 29 / Comments from an unperson at an unblog

Blogger Kevin Whited comments on yesterday's post about prestigious journalism awards copped by Chronicle editorialists:

If the authors of the editorials can be named after the fact, why not just do away with the pretense that it's a "group" thing and name them up front?

APRIL 28 / Congratulations

CONGRATULATIONS to Claudia Kolker for her first place for editorial writing and to David Langworthy for his honorable mention. The awards came to the Chronicle editorialists from the Texas Associated Press Managing Editors. Here are the winning pieces:

APRIL 27 / No posting today: Unca D is funeralizing.

APRIL 25 / Yellowstone Academy

THIS WEEK's good work is Yellowstone Academy, a fabulous private school for low-income children in Houston. Visit the Web site, write a check, hug your children.

APRIL 24 / No bickering about the details

LAST Saturday the Chronicle enthusiastically endorsed every major policy on President Obama's wish list -- essentially the federalization to one degree or another of our financial, energy, education, and health-care systems. 

APRIL 23 / So ostentatiously modest

HE HAD GONE to Europe not as the voice of his nation, but as a missionary with a message of atonement for its errors. Which were, as he perceived them -- arrogance, dismissiveness, Guantanamo, deficiencies in its attitudes toward the Muslim world, and the presidency of Harry Truman and his decision to drop the atomic bomb, which ended World War II.

APRIL 22 / More Garrison in the News

FROM Garrison in the News, March 26, 2009:

• Every week GITN features a page-one picture of Lexie Nichols, a beautiful preschooler who has endured and prevailed -- week by week -- over cancer. This week she is pictured smiling broadly in a flower-girl dress. "Proverbs 15:13 reads, 'A happy heart makes the face cheerful.'" (Cutline)

APRIL 21 / A shoutout from the memory hole . . .

. . . by blogHouston. 

APRIL 20 / Housecleaning at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

HAT TIP to Kevin Whited for passing this link about a coming remake of Atlanta's editorial page.

Dialing back a left-leaning editorial board in Atlanta is not, as the New York Times story intimates, a betrayal of the Georgia newspaper's admirable history of progressivism on race.