Sometimes there are so many crazy things going around, I can’t help but pile them up and make a comment or two. Sometimes no comment is needed.

“Don’t Hug Me!”

We now have the basic crime of too much hugging. Now, schools are banning the hug:

A measure of how rapidly the ritual is spreading is that some students complain of peer pressure to hug to fit in. And schools from Hillsdale, N.J., to Bend, Ore., wary in a litigious era about sexual harassment or improper touching — or citing hallway clogging and late arrivals to class — have banned hugging or imposed a three-second rule.

A three-second rule? Now we have refs patrolling school hallways ready to throw a flag! TWEET! TWEET!

“Foul, freshman in the blue shirt. Violation of three second rule. Penalty is 30 seconds in detention.”

Maybe they should spend more time in Minnesota. We don’t hug here.

GITMO

President Obama has run into the pressure of actually having to make tough decisions that don’t have easy answers. He announced the closing of Guantanamo detention facility but without a plan as to what to do with the remaining detainees. This hasn’t made even the Democrats in Congress happy, so they pulled funding until Obama came up with an actual PLAN for those detainees.

The main reason for closing Gitmo has been the uproar over the use of torture.

Here’s the good news: The United States no longer tortures. We haven’t used waterboarding in years.

Here’s the even better news (in the eyes of a politician): We’ve outsourced our torturing.

So now we have the luxury of saying, “Hey! We don’t torture!” while we let other countries “interrogate” captured prisoners.

In the past 10 months, for example, about a half-dozen midlevel financiers and logistics experts working with Al Qaeda have been captured and are being held by intelligence services in four Middle Eastern countries after the United States provided information that led to their arrests by local security services, a former American counterterrorism official said.

And a good time was had by all, I’m sure.

Now, it’s tempting to put this off on the “previous administration.” (We don’t want to mention any names any more, do we?)

But the article has this interesting sentence buried about halfway down:

The current approach, which began in the last two years of the Bush administration and has gained momentum under Mr. Obama, is driven in part by court rulings and policy changes that have closed the secret prisons run by the Central Intelligence Agency, and all but ended the transfer of prisoners from outside Iraq and Afghanistan to American military prisons.

A key phrase: “has gained momentum under Mr. Obama.”

It’s a crazy world.

“Anti” This, “Pro” That

Today in reading the news I also noticed the language in the media has switched again concerning abortion. The upcoming hearings for Supreme Court nominee Sonya Sotomayor will, of course, have heavy questioning over abortion rights. Most articles I’m reading now have switched from “pro-life” and “pro-choice” to the old language. They are using the pejorative “antiabortion” again. So it’s not “antiabortion” and “proabortion.” It’s “antiabortion” and “prochoice.”

Ah, let the good times roll.