Source: Guardian Graphic images that reveal the devastating impact of global warming in the Arctic have been released by the US military. The photographs, taken by spy satellites over the past decade, confirm that in recent years vast areas in high latitudes have lost their ice cover in summer months. The pictures, kept secret by Washington during the presidency of George W Bush, were declassified by the White House last week....

Source: Washington Post It's no longer possible to mince words, or pretend we didn't know. The International Committee of the Red Cross concluded in a secret report that the Bush administration's so-called "enhanced" interrogation methods, used on "high-value" terrorism suspects, plainly constituted torture. The time for euphemisms is over, and the time for accountability has arrived....

Source: Washington Post IMAGINE A PLACE where soldiers are entitled to burst through doors without warrants and citizens can be locked away without trial. Imagine that the leader of this place has the power to silence dissenters and the press and has the right to keep duly elected legislators from having a voice in these matters. Imagine further that he can unilaterally rip up and disregard any treaty he dislikes and that he has been told he is on solid legal ground by a hand-picked circle of advisers....

Source: New York Times We had two powerful reactions this week after the C.I.A. admitted to destroying 92 videotapes of interrogations that may involve torture and the Justice Department released several of the legal manifestos that former President George W. Bush used to justify mangling the Constitution after Sept. 11, 2001....

Source: Daily Kos Bush's departure from the news cycle has been so abrupt that you get the impression that were you to mention his name to Katie, Brian, or Wolf, all you'd get would be a puzzled look and a "Bush? How do you spell that?" Would that the rest of us could forget so quickly. While we are now looking forward to changes with the Obama administration, we're currently living with the world W wrought. For the last eight years, conservatives weren't just digging a hole, they pulled out a squadron of excavators that have put craters all over the national map. A...

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Source: Philadelphia Inquirer We already know that George W. Bush will walk away from his wreckage nine days hence, having bequeathed us record budget deficits, a tanking economy, a needless war costing half a trillion dollars and thousands of lives, a sullied global image, and so much more. But one other facet of his legacy is widely overlooked: He wrecked his own Republican Party....

Source: Guardian With only days left until his term expires, it appears that the Bush legacy project, an attempt by the usual corps of serial sycophants to rehabilitate the lame-duck generalissimo's image, is falling upon the deaf ears and self-gouged eyes of an American public sickened by the last eight years....

Source: New York Times Ask a long-serving member of the United States Senate — like, say, Patrick Leahy of Vermont — to reflect on the Senate’s role in our constitutional government, and he will almost invariably tell you a story from our nation’s founding that may or may not be apocryphal. It concerns an exchange that supposedly took place between Thomas Jefferson and George Washington in 1787, the year of the constitutional convention in Philadelphia. Jefferson, who had been serving as America’s ambassador to France during the convention, asked Washington over breakf...

Source: Pottersville Maybe Barry Goldwater's seat is just cursed. Maybe the biggest voter turnout since 1908 was too much for Diebold, ES&S; and Republican Secretaries of State to absorb to give us another November surprise. Maybe the Bradley Effect needs to be resurrected in a future Southern Strategy. Or maybe Americans were just too plain scared to not take a chance on Obama, the intelligent, articulate young candidate who by far represented change to over 62,000,000 Americans....

Source: Washington Post Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois was elected the nation's 44th president yesterday, riding a reformist message of change and an inspirational exhortation of hope to become the first African American to ascend to the White House. ...

Source: New York Times This is one of those moments in history when it is worth pausing to reflect on the basic facts: An American with the name Barack Hussein Obama, the son of a white woman and a black man he barely knew, raised by his grandparents far outside the stream of American power and wealth, has been elected the 44th president of the United States....

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Source: New York Times WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Some of the earliest returns in Tuesday's U.S. presidential election could provide big clues about the outcome....

Source: Reuters KISUMU, Kenya (Reuters) - Kenyans in Barack Obama's ancestral homeland prayed for victory Tuesday and relatives prepared to roast a bull in celebration if he becomes the first African-American president of the United States....

Source: AP DIXVILLE NOTCH, N.H. (AP) -- Barack Obama came up a big winner in the presidential race in Dixville Notch and Hart's Location, N.H., where tradition of having the first Election Day ballots tallied lives on....

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Source: Baltimore Sun Regardless of what the polls say, it's not clear who is going to win the presidential race. But it is clear who is going to lose: George W. Bush. If this contest proves anything, it's that the electorate is sick of him and eager for someone very different....

Source: Washington Post If the polls are right, if it don't rain and the creek don't rise, the winner of the presidential election is sure to be . . . Lyndon Baines Johnson. When he signed the epochal Civil Rights Act of 1964, Johnson knew he was also signing away the South and, with it, much of the white vote elsewhere as well. "We have lost the South for a generation," he supposedly said back then. For that generation, time's up....

Source: Washington Post Whoever wins this election, I understand what Barack Obama meant when he said his faith in the American people had been "vindicated" by his campaign's success. I understand what Michelle Obama meant, months ago, when she said she was "proud of my country" for the first time in her adult life. Why should they be immune to the astonishment and vertigo that so many other African Americans are experiencing? Why shouldn't they have to pinch themselves to make sure they aren't dreaming, the way that I do?...