There are so many things I will never know. For every bit of "useless" trivia that I do know, I am sure I am in the dark about thousands of other things. For example, did you know that the city of Cincinnati is named after the Roman General Cincinnatus? Cincinnatus was known for going back to being a farmer--instead of greedily clinging to power until he died--after a career in the military and politics. He was the model that George Washington followed. But I have met a few people (a couple of them recently) who live in Cincinnati who have never even heard of Cincinnatus.

Before I get too hoity-toity about knowing this bit of trivia, let me give you an example from the other side of the coin. There is a big framed red poster in our office with a crown at the top. It says, "Keep Calm and Carry On." I walk by it every day. I always thought it was just a poster put up by our general counsel in a response to the daily crisis of work, completely unaware until reading my brother's blog yesterday that it was the message that the British Government consistently delivered to its people (by way of posters and other means) during World War II and the Blitz.

Some have contrasted that calm, restrained governmental response to the US government's stress-inducing terror threat level elevations and duct tape alerts and threat-hyping just before elections...but far be it from me to go there. In our govt's defense, Bush did tell us to go shopping to support the war on terror, right? Maybe that's his way of telling us to Keep Calm and Carry On. But of course in London it was different...people were actually being asked to sacrifice at the same time as they were being asked to Keep Calm and Carry On.

Six years plus after 9/11, Bush has still not asked us to sacrifice anything tangible; it's only the military families who are really sacrificing. And one of the immoral pieces to this is that we have simply passed the monetary sacrifice to the next generation...whether this war ends up costing $700 billion or $1 trillion or more, we are asking our children and grandchildren to pay for it. Can you imagine what $1 trillion would have done for our country if we spent it on infrastructure? Or clean energy R&D? Or 40 million hybrid cars? Yes, it's true: $25K per car * 40 million (let's say Priuses) = $1 trillion dollars. Take that, Middle Eastern oil cartels who support terrorists.

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I saw a very interesting piece on 60 Minutes recently: Alton Logan spent 26 years in jail for a murder he did not commit--two attorneys for another guy knew the whole time that their client, and not Logan, did the crime. One of the most interesting facets of the story is that Logan’s atty, a public defender, says he agrees with the other two attys remaining silent due to their obligations to their own client. (That client released the two attys to discuss it upon his death, which recently occurred.)

I am curious as to anyone's opinion on this...were the two attorneys justified in their actions? It is as simple as "legally, yes; morally, no"?

One of the attorneys made a specific decision that he would come forward and break the confidence of his own client if Logan was sentenced to death. But instead, Logan got life in prison so the attorney kept quiet.