65 QuickLinks

Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Will Expletives Ring Out on C-SPAN?
(1 comments) The tender ears of Supreme Court justices - and the audience at the Supreme Court - will be subjected to raw expletives next week. The "fleeting expletives" case will examine the FCC's changing policy on the one-time, unscripted use of expletives on award shows and other broadcasts. Will C-SPAN itself run afoul of the FCC policy at issue in the case by broadcasting the same offending words?

Tuesday, October 21, 2008
McCain Requested Donations from Foreigners - IN WRITING
(1 comments) McCain must think public financing should include the public in RUSSIA, too. Russia's permanent mission to the UN said in a statement on Monday: "We have received a letter from Senator John McCain with a request for a financial donation to his presidential election campaign."

Tuesday, October 21, 2008
TNR: Barack Obama For President
The implosion of the old McCain, if he ever truly existed as we imagined, saddens us. Obama has the makings of a man who understands the times. Unlike Bush, he actually listens to those with whom he vehemently disagrees; and in debating McCain, he frequently, and without hesitation, voiced agreement. His election offers an opportunity to roll back the Bush legacy and perhaps even restore us to our former beauty.

Friday, October 10, 2008
Greenwald: The Right and mainstream America: a universe apart
(1 comments) Two new polls conclusively demonstrate how out-of-touch and fringe the Right has become. Obama's popularity holds steady while McCain's plummets, and Palin is a massive liability for his campaign. Americans see McCain as out-of-touch with their values. The more the McCain/Palin campaign attacks Obama with ugly, despicable smears, the worse McCain/Palin look to Americans.

Tuesday, September 30, 2008
The Sarah Palin Pity Party
(2 comments) Is this the week that Dems and Repubs join hands to heap pity on poor Sarah Palin? Even Amy Poehler, impersonating Katie Couric on SNL, jokes that Palin's cornered-animal ineptitude makes her "increasingly adorable." While Palin provokes many unpleasant emotions in me, I just can't seem to summon pity, affection or remorse. I can barely take the waves of embarrassment that come with watching someone do something so badly.

Tuesday, September 30, 2008
They Make You Embarrassed to be a Conservative
(3 comments) UCLA Law Professor Stephen Bainbridge says racists like Michelle Malkin and Mark Krikorian are embarrassing all conservatives by blaming the Wall Street meltdown on minorities. "The raving of people like Malkin and Krikorian should be taking place in a padded room in Arkham Asylum not in the public discourse. The freezing of the credit markets doesn't have anything to do with either affirmative action or illegal immigration."

Monday, September 29, 2008
Sarah Palin is ruining my life,
(3 comments) I've always disliked the pettiness of politics, the lies, mudslinging, arguments over meaningless minutiae, the parsing of personalities. Then came Sarah. I've crossed every line I believed should never be crossed in public discourse. I've criticized not only her policies and record, but her hair, personal style, her accent, her abilities as a mother. I've begun to suffer professionally. Is there a self-help group for this?

Monday, September 29, 2008
Gonzales to Face Continued Scrutiny in Criminal Probe
The report issued after an 18-month joint investigation by Inspector General Glenn Fine and OPR head H. Marshall Jarrett into the firings of nine U.S. Attorneys says exactly what Congressional Democrats have been worried about: "These removals were not a minor personnel matter – they were an unprecedented removal of a group of high-level Department officials..."

Thursday, September 25, 2008
Worst self-inflicted campaign move ever?
This is basically a "dog ate my homework" excuse that anyone can understand. The senator with one of the lowest actual-attendance rates at the Capitol in the last two years, and who has played little role in crafting legislation recently, suddenly needs to be nowhere but Washington -- exactly now?

Thursday, September 25, 2008
Religious Groups' Declaration demands presidential executive order on torture
Evangelicals for Human Rights, the National Religious Campaign Against Torture and the Center for Victims of Torture have drafted a declaration of principles its members want to see the next president include in an executive order on prisoner treatment, torture and cruelty.

Wednesday, September 24, 2008
I ghost-wrote letters to the editor for McCain
(4 comments) The offer was too alluring to delay. The assignment is simple: We are allowed to make up whatever we want as long as it adds to the campaign. We are to create a flow of fictional fan mail for McCain. I even pretended to have a son in Iraq.

Friday, September 19, 2008
Judge rejects saggy jeans law
A law that landed a Florida teenager in jail for having sagging jeans that exposed his underwear is unconstitutional, a judge has decided. The 17-year-old was arrested and jailed overnight for exposing 4in of boxer shorts in Riviera Beach, Florida.

Friday, September 19, 2008
Boxer Awakens After Two Months In Coma
Two months after slipping into a coma following a brain injury sustained during a televised fight, San Antonio welterweight Oscar Diaz is awake and breathing on his own.

Friday, September 19, 2008
Library Unearths Unknown Mozart Work
The single manuscript page, long hidden in a provincial French library, is the apparent underpinnings for a Mass he never composed. The library has had the fragment in its collection since the 19th century, but it had never been authenticated until now.

Friday, September 19, 2008
Conservatives Scare More Easily Than Liberals, Say Scientists
(3 comments) Science has now proven what we knew all along. Conservatives are scared senseless. In reflex tests of 46 political partisans, psychologists found that conservatives were more likely than liberals to be shocked by sudden threats. The results suggest that fear leads to political conservatism.

Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Less Than Half the World Believes al Qaeda Was Behind 9/11 Attacks
A poll of 16,000 people in 17 countries reveals the damage done to the credibility of the United States by the Bush administration.

Saturday, September 6, 2008
Palin: "So Sambo beat the bitch!"
(1 comments) This is how McCain's VP nominee Sarah Palin described Obama's win over Hillary to political colleagues in a restaurant after Obama's nomination. People who know her say she refers regularly to Alaska's Aboriginal people as "Arctic Arabs" and "mukluks."

Wednesday, September 3, 2008
McCain-Palin Camp Sanitizing Sites and Re-Dating Photos
(1 comments) History is being rewritten. Controversial photos of the Palin family that don't fit their story or timeline are now removed, re-captioned, and re-dated. Sites are cleansed of damaging or unflattering information. Everything is disappearing into Orwell's "memory hole."

Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Sarah Inhaled
(2 comments) McCain's new VP pick admits smoking pot, says she definitely inhaled - and is proud of it.

Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Palin's Mother-In-Law: Considering Voting For Obama
"I'm not sure what [Sarah] brings to the ticket other than she's a woman and a conservative. Well, she's a better speaker than McCain."

Tuesday, September 2, 2008
McCain Rushed, Got Sloppy
McCain looks like the utterly incompetent, rash, overconfident and desperate candidate that he is. He looks like a man who figured that the normal rules don't apply to him. He had his first face-to-face interview with Palin on Thursday and offered her the job moments later. "They didn't speak to anyone in the Legislature, they didn't speak to anyone in the business community."

Monday, September 1, 2008
McCain's Claim that Palin Opposed "Bridge to Nowhere" is FALSE
(4 comments) During her 2006 gubernatorial campaign, Palin supported Ted Stevens' "Bridge to Nowhere," and said the bridge was essential for the town's prosperity. Alaska's Republican leaders said they were blindsided by Palin's decision to pull the plug a year later. As George Stephanopoulos said: "she campaigned for it in her 2006 race and turned against it in 2007 only after it became a national joke."

Monday, September 1, 2008
Avoiding an Unintended Presidency
In order to prevent the conception of the wrong president, it's time to put some of our family planning skills to use. You should be informed on each presidential hopeful's stance on issues that could possibly put a damper on your sex life. Using "presidential contraception" will hopefully prevent an unintended president.

Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Angry Hillary Fans Make Waves in Denver
(3 comments) As frustrated Democrats converged on Denver yesterday, some began chanting "caucus fraud," while others shouted the word "sweetie," a reference to the time Obama called a female reporter by the same name.

Friday, August 22, 2008
Republicans Who Live Off Their Wives' Money
(1 comments) McCain himself isn't actually rich. He just lives off the inherited wealth of his much younger, former mistress and now-second-wife -- for whom he dumped his older and disfigured first wife -- and who then used her family's money to fund his political career and keep him living in extreme luxury.

Thursday, August 21, 2008
Does air conditioning make people vote Republican?
(4 comments) I blame A/C for the decline of the labor movement and for decimating the Midwest's population. Mostly, I blame it for the election of George W. Bush. After all, the GOP's rise in the South coincides with the region's adoption of air conditioning.

Wednesday, August 20, 2008
The Fall of Bush's Man in Pakistan
It is a measure of the Bush administration's broken foreign policy that the departure of the corrupt, longtime military dictator of Pakistan, is provoking fears in Washington of "instability." Despite Bush's warm embrace, Musharraf gutted the rule of law in Pakistan, including sacking its Supreme Court, and attempting to do away with press freedom.

Monday, August 11, 2008
McCain's attacks fall flat with vets
"John just isn't the same as he used to be. He's not his own man." Just one of 14 veterans interviewed after his speech said he is a certain McCain voter. McCain's embrace of Bush, whom Hendershot called a "draft-dodging coward," is even more perplexing because of the rivalry between them in the 2000 campaign.

Monday, August 11, 2008
Absolute Must-See Video!
(1 comments) McCain's life-long love affair.

Monday, August 11, 2008
McCain campaign manager was for McCain's record before he was against it
Sometimes the comments are even better than the articles. Case in Point: "Sometimes a maverick is just a lost cow." Case #2: "These people haven't brought a knife to a gun fight. They've brought a bunch of nerf balls and Silly String."

Sunday, August 10, 2008
McCain can't be sure veterans will fall in behind him
(1 comments) McCain voted for only one of the 5 spending bills Disabled American Veterans considered most important, opposing the other 4. Obama told the group, "We'll have a simple principle for veterans sleeping on our streets: zero tolerance." Many vets said they do not consider the Iraq war or McCain's military service to be key campaign issues.

Thursday, August 7, 2008
DOJ Asks Judge to Stay Subpoena Ruling
The Justice Dept. today notified District Judge Bates that it will appeal his decision requiring White House aides Harriet Miers and Josh Bolten to comply with congressional subpoenas and asked Bates to stay his ruling.

Thursday, August 7, 2008
The Goodling Report: How Aides Took Control of DOJ Hiring
Last week,the Justice Dept's top watchdogs told the tale of how the Bush DOJ used political litmus tests to hire only lawyers who would pursue a conservative agenda. Over 480 lawyers interviewed for career and political positions were tested with queries like, "Tell us about your political philosophy." Those who passed were labled "Good Americans." (free subscription required)

Thursday, August 7, 2008
John McCain Returning Foreign Donations
McCain is returning $50,000 in donations raised by a defense contractor who has amassed $500,000 for his campaign. The campaign has been stung by news accounts raising questions about donations solicited by a Jordanian native related to King Abdullah II of Jordan.

Wednesday, August 6, 2008
No executive privilege for presidential advisers
Judge Bates dismissed virtually every argument administration lawyers made. "It is the judiciary (and not the executive branch itself) that is the ultimate arbiter of executive privilege. Permitting the executive to determine the limits of its own privilege would impermissibly transform the presumptive privilege into an absolute one."

Wednesday, August 6, 2008
White House Faked Iraq-9/11 Link
Suskind described the forgery as one of the great lies in modern American political history, likening it to Watergate. White House condemnations of the book were equally dramatic, with officials blasting it as "gutter journalism." The White House directed CIA Director George J. Tenet to concoct a fake letter, backdated to July 2001, claiming that Atta had trained in Iraq for his mission.

Monday, August 4, 2008
The Dark Side
The tactics the president denounced were precisely those he had authorized and encouraged in the growing network of secret prisons around the world. Detainees, many of them innocent, have been held for months and years without charges, without lawyers, without notification to their families, tortured for weeks and months at a time. Bush's response to Abu Ghraib was not to stop torture, but to try to hide it more effectively.

Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Cheap, Energy-Saving Lamps From Aluminum Foil
Cheap, skinny aluminum foil lamps may soon illuminate our lives instead of big, bulky light bulbs. Researchers at the University of Illinois made the low-cost lamps by treating aluminum foil bought at the grocery store with an acidic bath. The new light source is lighter, brighter, and more efficient than incandescent light. The device is less than 1 millimeter thick.

Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Who Planned the Anthrax Attacks?
(1 comments) After the man they tried to frame settled his case against the government for $5.8 million, the question remains - if he didn't do it, who did? And why is the government still obstructing a real investigation in a case that should be easily solvable?

Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Bush Torture Techniques Copied from Communists
This, from the John Birch Society, no less: "Bush Administration interrogation techniques for detainees at Guantanamo Bay and other secret prisons were copied, in many cases word-for-word, from torture techniques employed by Chinese Communists against American prisoners during the Korean War. Will Americans stand silent now that these same show trials are being conducted by their own government?

Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Congress Threatens U.S. Attorney General With Contempt Over Leak Investigation
(1 comments) Rep. Henry Waxman threatened Attorney General Michael Mukasey on Tuesday with contempt for failing to respond to a subpoena and provide records of FBI interviews about the Plame leak.

Monday, July 7, 2008
What John McCain didn't learn in Vietnam
(1 comments) Nobody has denigrated the service of John McCain or his suffering in captivity as a prisoner of North Vietnam, as much as his supporters wish to pretend that someone did. But listening to him now and over the past decade or so, he also seems not to have learned why that war itself was a tragic mistake -- and why we needed to leave Vietnam long before we did.

Thursday, July 3, 2008
Shock Video: US Contractor Teaching Mexican Police How to Torture Suspects
(2 comments) Mexican citizens are in an uproar over newly released videos which show a US contractor teaching Mexican police how to torture suspects, including a crude variation of water boarding. Shows them practicing such techniques as dragging people through their own vomit under the directions of a U.S. adviser, jumping on a suspect's ribs and dunking a suspect's head in a hole said to be full of excrement and rats.

Monday, June 30, 2008
Throw 'em out: Voters set angry tone for November
(4 comments) Amnesty, amnesty, amnesty. Or deficit, deficit, deficit. Or Karl Rove, Karl Rove, Karl Rove. When the economy goes south because of shenanigans in the financial markets, when a six-year war bogs down in stalemate and incompetence and lies, when gasoline soars to $4 a gallon, you don't want to be in office. There's a theme here. It's "Throw the bums out."

Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Senator Feingold Will Filibuster FISA
(3 comments) "One of the greatest intrusions, potentially, on the rights of Americans protected under the 4th Amendment." - Senator Feingold blasts telecom spy bill.

Saturday, June 21, 2008
Joe Galloway: Bush authorized a systematic regime of torture
Famed war correspondent and co-author of the novel "We Were Soldiers Once...And Young" describes the journey of Maj. Gen. Anthony Taguba down the tunnel of the living Hell of Abu Ghraib and the investigation he was never supposed to complete. "By regulation - and no doubt by the design of those who appointed him - Taguba could not investigate any uniformed or civilian official whose rank was higher than his own two stars."

Friday, June 20, 2008
When McClellan testifies, Texan will fire back
Scott McClellan appears before Congress today. Lamar Smith, a Republican who represents parts of Austin, is none too pleased that the committee is spending its morning listening to the former press secretary reveal Bush's crimes. "It's certainly hard to take either the hearing or Mr. McClellan seriously given that, so far as I can tell, all we have here is a disgruntled employee who has written a self-serving book."

Thursday, June 19, 2008
Broken Laws, Broken Lives
A General accuses the Bush admin of war crimes. "...there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.

Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Exams show torture of U.S.-held detainees
Medical examinations of 11 former terrorism suspects held by U.S. troops found proof of physical and psychological torture resulting in long-term damage, a human rights advocacy group said on Wednesday. Mistreatment cited by the men included beatings and other physical and sexual abuse, isolation, forced nakedness and being forced into painful stress positions with hands and feet bound.

Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Shooting of Reuters Journalist in Iraq Justified, Says Pentagon
Pentagon: The 2005 shooting death of a Reuters journalist in Baghdad was justified because U.S. soldiers believed the camera protruding from an unmarked car was a rocket propelled grenade. Video of the incident, which was taped by Kadhem, was "accidentally" lost when the investigating officer mistakenly took it home to Louisiana with him. It was mailed back to Iraq, but never arrived there.

Tuesday, June 17, 2008
'Wash Times': V.A. Using Iraq Vets as Guinea Pigs in Drug Tests
Our government is testing drugs with severe side effects, including promoting suicidal behavior, on hundreds of vets. "You're a lab rat for $30 a month," says one Army sharpshooter who had a psychotic episode that ended in a near lethal confrontation with police.

Thursday, June 12, 2008
Secret Spy Court Repeatedly Questions FBI Wiretap Network
Does the FBI track cellphone users' physical movements without a warrant? Does the Bureau store recordings of innocent Americans caught up in wiretaps in a searchable database? Does the FBI's wiretap equipment store information like voicemail passwords and bank account numbers without legal authorization to do so? That's what the nation's Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court wanted to know, in a series of secret inquiries

Thursday, June 12, 2008
McCain Asks Supporters to Invade Liberal Blogs, But Few Respond
(2 comments) "I can't believe someone actually wasted time and donor money putting together a 'feature' that is so guaranteed to be useless that even his supporters are ignoring it," says Daily KOS. "Of course, it would help if their daily talking points were updated, you know, daily."

Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Washington ordered destruction of Guantanamo interrogation records
The document explicitly orders destruction of evidence to avoid potential exposure of government criminality. "This mission has legal and political issues that may lead to interrogators being called to testify," states the manual. "Keeping the number of documents with interrogation information to a minimum can minimize certain legal issues."

Sunday, June 8, 2008
Arraigning the 9/11 suspects, Guantanamo-style
(1 comments) It should have been a great day for justice. The alleged perpetrators of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks were finally appearing in court. But this was no ordinary court at all: It was a military commission, taking place more than six years after the terrorist attacks. And the quality of justice that the defendants were due to receive was in serious doubt.

Sunday, June 8, 2008
Republican Denied Communion for Supporting Obama
(1 comments) A law professor at Pepperdine University and once dean of Catholic University's law school--is a long-standing critic of the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision. The former head of the Office of Legal Counsel in the late 1980s, Kmiec is supporting Obama despite the candidate's position on abortion, not because of it. And he has been denied communion for his voting preference.

Thursday, June 5, 2008
TheHill.com - Bush bypasses Bond, talks to Dems on FISA
(1 comments) The Bush administration is talking directly with Democrats over rewriting the nation's surveillance laws and leaving the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee out of the debate, a senior Senate Democrat said Wednesday.

Thursday, June 5, 2008
Rohrabacher: Torture At Guantanamo Simply "˜Hazing Pranks From Some Fraternity'
Rohrabacher insisted the report documented nothing more than "fraternity boy pranks and hazing pranks," and hardly constituted torture

Wednesday, June 4, 2008
The Lime Green Monster: McCain's Abysmal Speech
"Here's how bad it is. All the Fox commentators are giving competing explanation for why McCain's speech sucked."

Saturday, May 24, 2008
Charges dropped against mall activists
(1 comments) Prosecutors dropped charges against two peace activists arrested for refusing to leave the Smithaven Mall during their silent protest of the Iraq war. One was reading the names of 4,000 dead soldiers, and a man wearing an anti-war T-shirt in another part of the mall were arrested. They met for the first time in court.

Saturday, May 10, 2008
Killing By the Numbers
"Drop weapons." "Hostile intent." The man who was in charge of snipers in Iraq that killed innocents and planted incriminating evidence on their bodies - who ordered the outright murder of an innocent farmer to improve "body count" - was convicted only of planting the AK-47 on his victim's body and sentenced to time-served. And now he is back on the job - training young Rangers in Georgia.

Thursday, May 8, 2008
Crippled Election Commission
(1 comments) The White House is removing a member of the Federal Election Commission for standing up for clean elections, while trying to install another member whose specialty is keeping eligible voters from casting ballots. The Senate, which must confirm nominees, should insist that President Bush appoint commissioners with a proven record of supporting voting rights and fair elections.

Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Notes From the War on Terror
(1 comments) The next president and Congress will have to work very hard to uncover all the ways President Bush has twisted or evaded the law, and then set things right.

Tuesday, May 6, 2008
The Lorita Doan Story
Ms. Doan exits the Bush administration as a minor but revealing character in a far more sweeping tale of the partisan undermining of public service.

Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Hillary's Fake Populism
(2 comments) So that's her calculation: if you disagree with her you are a sinner. This ruthlessness is also a promise about how she'd behave in office.