On July 26, Attorney General Eric Holder made promises to Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia via Russia's Justice Minister, Alexander Konovalov. In his open letter, Holder claimed that the United States would not execute Edward Snowden for his alleged crimes.

“The charges he faces do not carry that possibility, and the United States would not seek the death penalty even if Mr. Snowden were charged with additional death penalty-eligible crimes,” the letter stated. The letter further explains that Snowden does not face torture on American soil prior to his conviction for espionage, because “Torture is unlawful in the United States.”

The Russia government has vowed that it will not turn Snowden over to American authorities. The United States has threatened to cancel several high level diplomatic meetings over the flap. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has called for a boycott of the 2014 Olympics if Snowden is not returned. Some sources have speculated that Obama may cancel his trip to Moscow after the G-20 Summit over Russia's issuance of temporary asylum to the whistle-blower turned world’s most hunted man.

If John Kerry was beating his children and promising to stop "very very soon" and then explaining that he meant "very very soon" in a geological sense, he'd be forced to resign his office.

If we even discovered that John Kerry had once beaten one of his children, even many years ago, perhaps shortly after he returned from killing people in Vietnam, he'd be forced to resign.

Imagine if we were to discover that John Kerry was actually murdering children, and women, and men, using missiles shot out of flying robots and promising to stop "very very soon" and explaining that what he meant by that was "I'd like to see you try to stop me you goddamn primitive Pashtun peons."

Would we respond?

We didn't respond when he claimed Bush won Ohio. How'd that work out?

What if we were about to consider possibly responding, and maybe even growing indignant, and John Kerry stood up on a pile of corpses and screamed "Wolf! Giant ass wolf right behind you! Arabic speaking wolf! Wolf! Wolf!"

“My life would be worthless without music,” the girl said.

And the music came, up from the garbage, through her hands and heart and out to the world. My god, she was playing a violin made out of an old can. A boy was playing a cello crafted with more love and ingenuity than I can imagine, from a used oil drum, old wool and tossed-out beef-tenderizing tools.

The brief YouTube video, precursor to a documentary film to be released in January, is called “Landfill Harmonic [2]”; it’s about a children’s orchestra in a Paraguayan village — a slum — called Cateura, which is built on a landfill. Reclaiming and reselling the trash that arrives every day is the residents’ means of survival. Real violins are not to be found in such a place; they’re worth more than a family’s home.

“There was no money for real instruments when local musician Favio Chavez started his music school in the barrio,” according to the movie’s website, “so together they started to make instruments from trash — violins and cellos from oil drums, flutes from water pipes and spoons, guitars from packing crates.”

The sun rose with a moral verdict on Bradley Manning well before the military judge could proclaim his guilt. The human verdict would necessarily clash with the proclamation from the judicial bench.

In lockstep with administrators of the nation’s war services, judgment day arrived on Tuesday to exact official retribution. After unforgiveable actions, the defendant’s culpability weighed heavy.

“Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house,” another defendant, Fr. Daniel Berrigan, wrote about another action that resulted in a federal trial, 45 years earlier, scarcely a dozen miles from the Fort Meade courtroom where Bradley Manning faced prosecution for his own fracture of good order.

“We could not, so help us God, do otherwise,” wrote Berrigan, one of the nine people who, one day in May 1968 while the Vietnam War raged on, removed several hundred files from a U.S. draft board in Catonsville, Maryland, and burned them with napalm in the parking lot. “For we are sick at heart…”