2.23.2008 Bill Maher: "And then there's that other possibility, the one that's starting to scare me: That by a certain neocon definition, Iraq is a success." (Here)

2.21.2008 This is hilarious! EXPELLED

2.20.2008 smintheus: "Rifling Obama's passport file"

2.26.2008 clammyc: "McCain's voting record - how he REALLY supports the troops"

3.20.2008 emptywheel: Waxman Attempts to Plug Truck-Sized Loophole for Theft

Remember that truck-sized loophole for theft the Bush Administration created? The one that takes a rule that says contractors have to reveal contracting fraud, and adds a loophole for anyone doing business outside the US? Well, Waxman is on it: More

By November, after it left the Justice Department and was published in the Federal Register, the proposed rule specifically exempted "contracts to be performed outside the United States."

The Justice Department and the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction have asked the exemption be eliminated before the rule becomes law. Additionally, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, has threatened to block the loophole in the federal budget if the administration does not do away with it.

OMB's Office of Federal Procurement Policy has repeatedly declined to comment on the loophole or how it was added to the overall fraud crackdown.
LARA JAKES JORDAN:HuffPo

Slate is publishing a series of articles from so-called "liberal hawks" who supported the invasion of Iraq, asking them to reflect on "why they got it wrong."
...
But virtually every line of rationale is purely utilitarian in its reasoning. The most unadorned admissions of error amount to little more than a concession that they simply assessed the costs and benefits inaccurately. And even with that extremely narrow concession, none of them -- either in Slate or elsewhere -- even reference in passing the fact that the war they cheered on ended the lives of hundreds of thousands (at least) of innocent Iraqi citizens and caused the internal and external displacement of millions more. That just doesn't exist in the calculus.

More strikingly, not a single one of them appears to have learned the real lesson worth learning from the whole disaster: The U.S. should not -- and has no right to -- invade, bomb and occupy other nations that haven't attacked or even threatened to attack us. None of them say: "Wars that aren't directly in response to an actual or imminent attack shouldn't be commenced because doing so leads to the deaths of hundreds of thousands or millions of human beings for no justifiable reason." Not even the most regretful war advocate seems to have reached that conclusion.
...
UPDATE: In comments, Iokannan in the Well notes the primary reason why they won't learn the above lessons:

These war advocates, I would wager to a one, have learned nothing for one simple reason: They have no actual investment in the conflict they cheer for.
They and their families have not or will not serve in the armed forces.
They and their families are not at economic or emotional risk of losing loved ones overseas.
They and their families have insulated themselves through distance and willing ignorance against the devastation they've cheered for.

Salon.com

The president will continue to claim the country is in grave danger over this issue, but it is not. The real danger is for Mr. Bush. A good law — like the House bill — would allow Americans to finally see the breathtaking extent of his lawless behavior.
NYT

However it eventually plays out, the inside-the-administration drama underscores a point that has largely been lost in the run-up to the argument in this high-profile case: a ruling that the Constitution guarantees an individual as opposed to a collective right to gun ownership would be far from the end of the age-old debate over the meaning of the Second Amendment. To borrow from Winston Churchill, it would only be the end of the beginning.

The court would then have to move to the next stage, defining what an individual right actually entails and what government regulations it permits. In constitutional analysis, this is where the rubber meets the road. For every constitutional right, the court chooses a standard of review, essentially a determination of how high a bar the government has to clear in order to justify a regulation impinging on the right.
LINDA GREENHOUSE:NYT

(Pincus) "The important thing is to show integrity-- not to be a neuter, politically. Having good facts that hold up is a bigger advantage than claiming to reflect all sides equally well."
Jay Rosen:PressThink

...Officially, the Fed won’t be buying mortgage-backed securities outright: it’s only accepting them as collateral in return for loans. But it’s definitely taking on some mortgage risk. Is this, to some extent, a bailout for banks? Yes.

Still, that’s not what has me worried. I’m more concerned that despite the extraordinary scale of Mr. Bernanke’s action — to my knowledge, no advanced-country’s central bank has ever exposed itself to this much market risk — the Fed still won’t manage to get a grip on the economy. You see, $400 billion sounds like a lot, but it’s still small compared with the problem.
...
What if this initiative fails? I’m sure that Mr. Bernanke and his colleagues are frantically considering other actions that they can take, but there’s only so much the Fed — whose resources are limited, and whose mandate doesn’t extend to rescuing the whole financial system — can do when faced with what looks increasingly like one of history’s great financial crises.
NYT:Op-Ed

"It is unprecedented and an unlawful act of political interference for the president personally to override a decision that the Clean Air Act leaves exclusively to EPA's expert scientific judgment," said John Walke, clean-air director for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Juliet Eilperin:WaPo

House Judiciary Committee Democrats say they analyzed the telecom spying documents they've sought for more than a year and have come to the conclusion the phone and internet companies don't deserve retroactive amnesty for charges they spied illegally on Americans.

Instead, they say, the telecoms should be freed from the confines of the so-called "state secrets privilege" and be able to show their documents to the federal judge overseeing the 38 or so cases pending against companies such as Sprint, AT&T and Verizon.

House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-Michigan) released the letter (.pdf) Wednesday in anticipation of a planned Thursday vote on a new House spying bill that proposes just a "tell it to the judge" solution, in lieu of the get-out-of-jail-free provision in the Senate bill.
Ryan Singel:wired.com

See also Wikipedia: "Though known for its expertise in aerospace and defense, Carlyle invested more than thirty percent of its assets in the telecommunications and media sector."

No wonder Bush is defending the telcoms

3.13.2008 F.B.I. Made ‘Blanket’ Demands for Phone Records

The bureau appears to have used the blanket records demands at least 11 times in 2006 alone as a quick way to clean up mistakes made over several years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to a letter provided to Congress by a lawyer for an F.B.I. agent who witnessed the missteps.
Eric Lichtblau:NYT

See Also: First Casualty Of The Iran War

... Although Fallon's preference for diplomatic engagement with Iran rather than saber-rattling has been echoed by Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Michael Mullen, Fallon's manner of delivering that message differed considerably from the administration script. In Barnett's Esquire article, Fallon says a narrow focus on Iran is not wise because "in a part of the world with 'five or six pots boiling over, our nation can't afford to be mesmerized by one problem.'" "This constant drumbeat of conflict" with Iran "is not helpful and not useful," Fallon told al Jazeera in September 2007. In December 2007, he told the Financial Times, "Another war is just not where we want to go." Last year, he was quoted as saying an attack on Iran "will not happen on my watch." In November, after meeting with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Fallon allowed it to be reported that he had "ruled out a possible strike against Iran and said Washington was mulling nonmilitary options instead." According to Newsweek, Fallon's main mistake was that he never included the caveat "of course, no options are off the table" in order to stay within administration policy.
Progress Report:3.13.08

The ball starts on the 50% line (+-4%)
* Scoring is determined by moving the goal posts.
* Anything at all can serve as a political football.
* Certain players are super-players and count on the roster as 17,000 players.
* Each team designates one person as a quarterback unless the quarterback is the spouse of a former quarterback where a two quarterback scheme is permitted.)
* Michigan and Florida were ejected from the game as a penalty, but as in hockey, they can come back in before their penalty is over if the other team scores first. Also as in hockey, this is called a "power play."
* All decisions of the umpires are final. However, no decisions can be made until there are five umpires on the field, and currently there are only two. The others are not expected to be ratified until the game concludes.
* Recording of parts this event are prohibited without express written consent of the FISA court, but only if rule of law applies in your area.
* It aint over 'til Guam

The sordid history of American psychology when it comes to collaboration with governmental agencies in the research and implementation of techniques of psychological torture is one that our field will have to confront sooner or later. In a larger sense, the problems presented here are inherent in a larger societal dilemma regarding the uses of knowledge. This problem was recognized by the first critics of untrammeled scientific advance, and represented powerfully by Goethe's Faust, and Mary Shelley's Doctor Frankenstein. Human knowledge is capable of producing both good and evil. The scientist, the scholar, and the doctor hold tremendous responsibility in their hands. That they have not shown themselves, in a tragic number of instances, to ethically wield or control this responsibility has meant that the 21st century opens under the awful prospect of worldwide nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare, while a sinister, behaviorally-designed torture apparatus operates as the servant of nation-states wielding these awful weapons of mass destruction.
Alternet

The amount of data which the Federal Government now collects and stores regarding the behavior of innocent American citizens is truly staggering. It is just literally true that the Government now maintains sweeping digital dossiers on its citizens, including ones who have never been charged with, let alone convicted of, any wrongdoing of any kind. And without much debate or attention of any kind, the amount of monitoring and the scope of the data just keeps growing. Since when was sweeping domestic surveillance and keeping records about innocent Americans ever supposed to be a function of the Federal Government?
Salon

If you've followed Senator John McCain at all, you've heard about his tendency to, well, explode.
...
You've heard about his penchant for bellicose rhetoric, whether appropriating a Beach Boys song in threatening to bomb Iran or telling Russian President Vladimir Putin that he doesn't care what he thinks about American plans to install missiles in Eastern Europe.
...
And you've heard, no doubt, about McCain's stubbornness.
...
But what you may not have heard is an extended critique of the kind of Commander in Chief that Captain McCain might be. To combat what he likes to call "the transcendent challenge [of] radical Islamic extremism," McCain is drawing up plans for a new set of global institutions, from a potent covert operations unit to a "League of Democracies" that can bypass the balky United Nations, from an expanded NATO that will bump up against Russian interests in Central Asia and the Caucasus to a revived US unilateralism that will engage in "rogue state rollback" against his version of the "axis of evil." In all, it's a new apparatus designed to carry the "war on terror" deep into the twenty-first century. Robert Dreyfuss:The Nation

3.4.2008 "Sanity and the Second Amendment" By Prof. Lawrence H. Tribe

3.4.2008 "Supreme Court May Re-examine What Is "Indecent"

3.1.2008 Distortions are in the eye of the beholder: The Economist

The sad thing is that one might reasonably have expected better from Mr Obama. He wants to improve America's international reputation yet campaigns against NAFTA. He trumpets “the audacity of hope” yet proposes more government intervention. He might have chosen to use his silver tongue to address America's problems in imaginative ways—for example, by making the case for reforming the distorting tax code. Instead, he wants to throw money at social problems and slap more taxes on the rich, and he is using his oratorical powers to prey on people's fears.
(Here)