Well, one could argue that those are the twin themes of this blog, which celebrates its eighth anniversary, today. It’s also the title of a tome by legal commentator Benjamin Wittes, a tome suggesting the controversial premise that our current laws aren’t sufficient for the “all new unique to the history of the world conflict against terrorism” we are facing… and so, new ones are needed. Well, I’m delighted to report that my colleague and friend Thomas Nephew of the great Newsrack blog and I will be taking on the task of analyzing Mr. Wittes’s book, chapter by chapter, more...

A new study has concluded that an average of 45,000 Americans die prematurely each year from a lack of health insurance coverage. Given that there are 45 million Americans who are uninsured (plus or minus illegal aliens… Congressman Joe Wilson wants you to know that it’s a.o.k. with him if they die in the streets like animals, even if not treating them results in infectious diseases spreading to, you know, White people… and other catastrophes, just so long as you-know-who continues to be screwed by the system)… that means it would take around 1,000 years to do God’s work and...

In works of Shakespeare and in other “sensitive” human contexts (such as… dictatorships) the only character permitted to speak the actual truth is the fool or the jester. In keeping with that tradition, the Grey Lady permits us to hear an uncomfortable truth (or perhaps tells itself, since we have known for quite a while) through the vehicle of the usually “lighthearted” Maureen Dowd. That unpleasant truth is that the binding and driving motivation of extremists from Joe Wilson to the Scaife/Coors, et al. sponsored “teabaggers”… is… wait for it… racism. Shocking, I know. But millions of Americans just want...

The Grey Lady treats us to “a year later view of Wall Street.” And the picture looks… surprisingly similar to what it did a year ago. Except now everyone is more convinced that the government will step in to bail them out of bad decisions (from which the “haves” such as Goldman Sachs may continue to benefit from the upside) than they were during “the crisis” when there was, at least, the possibility that the government would not. Which just means that many economists, including some who have been right about the dot-com and housing bubbles, see the next inevitable...

And so we arrive at the eighth anniversary of “The-Day-Before-Which-The-Thinking-Was-All-Different.” Back when we thought accused wrongdoers should have things like due process, attorneys, charges, trials… before we decided to lock them up and throw away the key. Back when we might have “trusted our government” to bring us goodies like health care, but probably wouldn’t accept “trust us” when it came to reading our mail and e-mail, listening to our phone calls, and reserving the right to “preventively detain” any of us for, you know, “our own safety.” Regular readers know that on “the day” I happened to be at...

Well, the actual UK Telegraph story, about a Chinese official expressing “concern” about likely U.S. inflationary measures (i.e. “monetizing debt,” a/k/a gearing up those printing presses) seems mundane enough. China is the holder of the largest international U.S. dollar reserves (some $2 trillion) and is concerned both the ongoing viability of its investment, and of its own export-based economy amidst the new economic reality. No, the part of the article that amused me is the quoting of CPC official Cheng Siwei (now “head of the green energy drive” and “former vice-hairman of the Standing Committee”… whatever they are… it’s not...

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco has permitted a lawsuit against former Attorney General John Ashcroft to proceed, said lawsuit brought by an Muslim-American citizen of this country who contended that his detention on purported “material witness” grounds violated his civil rights; needless to say, the plaintiff, was never charged with a crime, and never asked to testify in anyone else’s criminal proceeding, though he was detained, and claims that it resulted in loss of employment and loss of his marriage. The Ninth Circuit, widely regarded as the nation’s most liberal federal appeals court, has often been...

We’ll start with this, where Paul Krugman tells us succinctly that we’re probably not going to get a decent health care reform plan at all, and if we do, it will be less good than Richard Nixon offered Democrats thirty-five years ago. Why? It’s the corporate cash, stupid: Democrats are possibly more beholden to it than Republicans (Republicans being a more natural ally of business interests). With an army of lobbyists ready to blast Congress, and a war-chest of billions in corporate cash ready to blast the airwaves and man the barricades with outrageous misinformation (and a public primed to...

We’ll start with this wonderful piece of misinformation from WaPo, which should know better than to publish crap like it, in this case, insisting that “torture works” because “KSM was so forthcoming” after waterboarding. If that’s the case, than kindly explain why it was necessary to waterboard him 183 times? Sounds like something other than “torture works”… unless it “works” to get some official’s rocks off, maybe. The ever-vigilant Glenn Greenwald enumerates the plethora of things wrong with the WaPo piece (hint: everything, including being at odds with WaPo’s own less “shilling for Dick Cheney” reporting, by actual journalists rather...

Go read Andy’s interview with Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell. Read it now.