Crossposted at Daily Kos

    Alan Grayson (BIG D-FL08) is my new hero. We need this guy in Congress for years to come!

    But first, on to the show, and what a show it is!

    Full transcript of the can of whoop@$$ unleashed by Grayson on Republicans AND weak kneed Dems below the fold.

Crossposted at Daily Kos

    If you missed the last two nights of Countdown with Keith Olbermann you missed a lot of new details in the Health care Reform debate, and I don’t want to sound bleak, but things do not look good. The main points are these.

Wendel Potter:      “If there’s not a public option, the plan that is passed, if it’s passed and signed by the President, will not be sustainable. And it ultimately will be a disaster for the middle class and ultimately be a disaster for the Democratic party . . .

~snip~

    “We’ll be paying a lot more out of our own pockets. We’ll have the appearance of being able to afford premiums but we won’t be able to afford health care. That can not be sustained.”

    You can watch the video here

    And then there is the news that Rahm Emanuel will be representing the White House in the presumably upcoming Houuse-Senate Conference committee. Thus the title “If you wanna kill the (Public Option) you gotta do it yourself.

    More below the fold, and it ain’t pretty, with a call for action that puts it all on the line.  

    More than eight months after President Barack Obama took office, one third of the country’s U.S. Attorney offices are still run by prosecutors appointed during the administration of Republican George W. Bush, according to a review of data by Main Justice.

    At this point in October 2001 – after Bush succeeded Democrat Bill Clinton – less than 9 percent of the slots were occupied by Clinton holdovers.

mainjustice.com

    Change? Well, I guess if you consider taking a dollar and giving you back 67 cents change, you can count it as change, right?

    In an Administration so dedicated to bipartisanshit that they are seemingly willing to take the blame for fuck ups caused by their predecessors and risk becoming complicit in the last administrations war crimes, nothing speaks to the ineptitude of this current administration to distance themselves from or even address the failures of the criminal Bush/Cheney Administration than the fact that the Bush US Attorney’s who politicized the process of prosecuting matters of law is still more Bush than the Bush Administration was Clinton by this point in unpopularly elected, Supreme Court imposed Ex-President Bush’s first term.

    Between that and the Republiican dominated military appointments made by the Obama team since his election, the team of rivals is quickly starting to look like the team of people who undermine one another while appearing to not know what the fuck they are talking about.

    But as president, Obama has moved cautiously to replace U.S. Attorneys. While Bill Clinton asked for the resignation of all U.S. Attorneys after taking office in 1993 – a move that was criticized at the time as disruptive – the Obama White House has consulted closely with Republican senators. At times, the White House has delayed moving forward when GOP senators objected to an intended nominee. At the same time, some Democratic senators and House members have been slow in forwarding their recommendations for U.S. Attorneys to the White House, c0ntributing to delays, say people familiar with the process.

mainjustice.com

    Among the Bushie leftovers are Middle Alabama District US Attorney Leura Canary, who prosecuted Don Seigelman in a fradulent case, Bill Mercer of Montana, who managed to hold two jobs at once during his tenure and in New Mexico, Gregory J. Fouratt, who replaced US Attorney David Iglesias who refused to stage a witch hunt against ACORN, that evil group whi si guilty of the heinous crimes of registering minorities to vote and fighting Corporate America for a living wage for the proletariat.

     The end story, Obama really isn’t that different from Bush after all, or at least not as of now, almost a year since he won the election.

     But you can still cheer for change if you want. Hell, 2/3rds of change is better than nothing, right?

     It seems that Mr. Greenspan has reared his head again to give us more of his unsound economic advice. You’d think one ginormous worldwide financial disaster would be enough for this guy, but Alan Greespan, like an animal trainer after a wild mauling, insists on trying to help even after the white tiger has clawed your face off.

    So I am going to take a page out of Bill Maher’s book and put down a New Rule.

    There will only be 1 Clusterfuck alloted per idiot expert from now on. After that, should you attempt to give us more advice, we get to move you into a box underneath the Queensboro Bridge, and then launch that box into deep space.

    Take the New York Times for instance. Now that we might go to war with a country with four letters in it’s name that starts with I they have “advice” to give us. Good thing for me, between the New York Times’s advice on I country wars and Greenspans expertise, I can wipe my ass with the place I live now.

    America, land of the Double Whopper with WTF sauce. Pass the scotch.

    More ranting below the fold

Crossposted at Daily Kos

    Sen. Barbara Boxer, who heads the committee, told CNN that there is a preliminary investigation of Ensign’s actions. “We will look at all aspects of this case, as we do whenever there is a case before us, and try to get to the bottom of it as quickly as we can in fairness to all,” said Boxer, D-Calif.

huffingtonpost.com

    John Ensign, of C Street and extramarital affair infamy, will get off scot free here, because the game is rigged. What a surprise, the Select Senate Committee on Ethics is Unethical.

    Regarding C Street and The Family, Senator Mark Pryor is up to his eyeballs in this scandal.

Who sits on the Senate Ethics Committee?

Chairwoman

Barbara Boxer (D-CA)

Mark Pryor (C-Street) (D-AR)

Sherrod Brown (D-OH)

Vice chair

Johnny Isakson (R-GA)

Pat Roberts (R-KS)

Jom Risch (R-ID)

    My bet, Ensign walks away without a slap on his wrist, 2 -4 bipartisan vote in favor of corruption and sex scandals.

    More on this and a call to action below the fold

Crossposted at Daily Kos

      “You guys,” David said, “are here to learn how to rule the world.”

~snip~

    “It’s called a covenant. Two, or three, agree? They can do anything. A covenant is . . . powerful. Can you think of anyone who made a covenant with his friends?”

We all knew the answer to this, having heard his name invoked numerous times in this context. Andrew from Australia, sitting beside Doug, cleared his throat: “Hitler.”

“Yes,” Doug said. “Yes, Hitler made a covenant. The Mafia makes a covenant. It is such a very powerful thing. Two, or three, agree.”

harpers.org Jeff Sharlet’s “Jesus + Nothing”

     What Douglas Coe is talking about is fascism, Christofascism, where a few powerful dominate the masses despie their collective will and against their interests.

    Go below the fold. I’m Naming Names.

Crossposted at Daily Kos

    In a startling article at huffingtonpost.com by Andy Worthington, author of “The Guantanamo Files”, puts together an absolute must read in my opinion.

False confessions obtained through torture

   The judge also noted the significance of the evidence in the record indicating that al-Rabiah “subsequently confided in interrogators [redacted] that he was being pressured to falsely confess to the allegations discussed above,” and also the significance of the fact that, although “al-Rabiah’s interrogators ultimately extracted confessions from him,” they “never believed his confessions based on the comments they included in their interrogation reports.”

    After noting — again with a palpable sense of incredulity — that “These are the confessions that the Government now asks the Court to accept as evidence in this case,” Judge Kollar-Kotelly proceeded to demolish them all . . .

From Huffingtonpost.com

Bold added by diarist

     More below the fold

Crossposted at Daily Kos

    Two weeks ago, on 9/15/09, a few good men, actual Marines, told chickenhawks Ex VP Daddy Cheney and his Brat Daughter, who have never served in the military, to STFU, cause your not helping.

    Former Marine commandant Charles Krulak and former Marine general Joseph Hoar, who succeeded Schwarzkopf at Central Command, dress(es) down former VP Cheney on the issue of torture.

    “… we never imagined that we would feel duty-bound to publicly denounce a vice president of the United States, a man who has served our country for many years. In light of the irresponsible statements recently made by former Vice President Dick Cheney, however, we feel we must repudiate his dangerous ideas — and his scare tactics.”

~snip~

    “What leaders say matters. So when it comes to light, as it did recently, that U.S. interrogators staged mock executions and held a whirling electric drill close to the body of a naked, hooded detainee, and the former vice president winks and nods, it matters.”

ricks.foreignpolicy.com

Bold added by the diarist

      If you like that, it gets even better below the fold.