The Lazy Panda linkdump

Too lazy to write proper posts...but these are the gems left in the net after my morning trawl through the internets.

-- The case for Euro optimism?

Despite his subtitle (''Social Europe vs. Liberal America"), Pontusson says it's unfair to compare Europe to the United States alone. So his third category is the ''liberal-market economies": America, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, New Zealand, and Australia.

Within this framework, it's not clear that liberal economies generate more wealth. Americans do make more per capita than anyone else: $36,100 a year in 2002, for example, but social-market Norway is right on its heels, at $35,500, and most of the other nations fall into a narrow band of $26,000 to $29,000. All of which makes the supremacy of either social or liberal approaches far from obvious.

Then there's inequality. Correcting for purchasing power in each country (which helps the United States), Pontusson comes up with a poverty rate of 15 percent in the liberal-market economies, more than three times that in the other two groups. The American rate is 11.7 percent; the rates in liberal-market Ireland, Australia, and the United Kingdom are higher.

-- Mike the Mad Biologist names and shames the Democratic senators who didn't back the filibuster.

-- If true, this is shocking.

Last week, Col. Janis Karpinski told a panel of judges at the Commission of Inquiry for Crimes against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration in New York that several women had died of dehydration because they refused to drink liquids late in the day. They were afraid of being assaulted or even raped by male soldiers if they had to use the women's latrine after dark.

The latrine for female soldiers at Camp Victory wasn't located near their barracks, so they had to go outside if they needed to use the bathroom. "There were no lights near any of their facilities, so women were doubly easy targets in the dark of the night," Karpinski told retired US Army Col. David Hackworth in a September 2004 interview.