they call it "xanadu"

This piece in Slate is interesting and depressing. Basically the argument is that the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will make all the old Bush-Cheney war-on-terror policy into flat-out law. The defense will, quite legitimately, point out e.g. that the defendant was tortured repeatedly, imprisoned indefinitely, etc, so as to make his statements inadmissible. Then the judge and jury will convict him anyway---nobody's going to let this guy off---and then, in the appeals process,

a higher court will countenance the cowardly decisions made by the trial judge, ennobling them with the unfortunate force of precedent. The judicial refusal to consider KSM's years of quasi-legal military detention as a violation of his right to a speedy trial will erode that already crippled constitutional concept. The denial of the venue motion will raise the bar even higher for defendants looking to escape from damning pretrial publicity. Ever deferential to the trial court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit will affirm dozens of decisions that redact and restrict the disclosure of secret documents, prompting the government to be ever more expansive in invoking claims of national security and emboldening other judges to withhold critical evidence from future defendants. Finally, the twisted logic required to disentangle KSM's initial torture from his subsequent "clean team" statements will provide a blueprint for the government, giving them the prize they've been after all this time—a legal way both to torture and to prosecute.

The zombie hands of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and Yoo are dragging us back to their swampy grave. Thanks, guys.

In other news, yesterday we discovered that Chris's cell phone alarm is the theme from Xanadu. For the past three years, he's been waking up to a corny midi-fied version of this already corny original:



What I want to know is: how did this end up being the default alarm on the LG Cyon?