Anyone who takes health insurance reform seriously recognizes that universal government-funded health care is the only way to eliminate the abuses of the health insurance industry and control costs to the point that per capita spending on health care in the US falls more or less into line with other developed countries rather than running [...]

The PATRIOT Act was up for renewal this week. Democrats wanted to add some civil liberties backstops to it, but were unable to get it done because, well, they’re Democrats, and the getting done of things just isn’t among their areas of expertise. So they compromised with themselves by kicking the can down the road [...]

The United States, we are often told, is a nation bound by the rule of law. We hear that less and less as it becomes more and more risible but I guess it still officially is, unless you’re the president, or you’re operating an armed drone on behalf of the president, or torturing someone on [...]

Retired general and former Secretary of State Alexander Haig, who did much worse stuff but is best known as the guy who appointed himself acting president when Ronald Reagan was shot, is dead. Barack Obama hails him as representative of “our finest warrior-diplomat tradition of those who dedicate their lives to public service.” Jonathan Schwarz [...]

Many years ago, very shortly after BTC News burst upon the blogosphere like a firefly at high noon, we began an occasional feature called My Favorite Warlord. Readers were invited to play along; all that’s required is to choose one among the host of what are commonly referred to as warlords in Afghanistan, and do [...]

Less than 24 hours after promising to “end the outsized influence of lobbyists” and “do our work openly,” Barack Obama’s White House began quietly inviting lobbyists to join in “a series of conference calls with senior Obama administration officials to discuss key aspects of the State of the Union address.”
The Hill, which publishes from offices [...]

Perhaps the most outstanding achievement of the speech was getting Chris Matthews to forget that Obama is not an Irishman. Seriously: Chris Matthews said that “I forgot he was black tonight for an hour.” Dude. Seek help. Never mind.
The White House web site has a transcript of the speech along with a convenient guide [...]

Actually 22 Democrats and one Democratic Socialist, Bernie Sanders, voted against creating a commission that could force cuts to social welfare programs in order to end deficit spending and reduce the national debt. Interestingly, fewer Republicans than Democrats supported the legislation—16 of the former (plus Joe Lieberman, naturally) and 36 of the latter voted in [...]

Former Democratic Leadership Council chairman Bruce Reed takes a predictable lesson for Democrats away from the Scott Brown victory in Massachusetts: Run away, run away! He quotes Missouri Senator Claire McKaskill, who reacted to the election by saying that “people out there believe that we are going too far, too fast,” and he opines that [...]

I’m not a competent photographer but I received a very nice digital camera as a holiday gift and I’ve been taking it with me pretty much everywhere I go. One of the things I struggle with is recognizing what will make a good picture; for whatever reason I can’t seem to visualize what a [...]

Specifically, our freedom to do whatever it is we want to do to them and their part of the world without consequence.
Disclaimer: I don’t support terrorism as an expression of political or ideological frustration, or in any event, but I understand the impulse and one has to admit that as a negotiating technique, it [...]

A recent exchange with a reflexively anti-Muslim American prompts me to post what is tragically not an unnecessary reminder that not all Palestinians are Muslims, that not all Palestinians and Muslims hate Jews, that not all Jews hate Palestinians and Muslims, that not all anti-Semites are Palestinian or Muslim or Arab, and that reflexive support [...]

Via Digby, an excellent writer trying very hard to cherish her remaining illusions, we learn that Billy Tauzin, the Louisiana GOP representative who left the House to take a multi-million dollar salary as the chief lobbyist for the drug industry shortly after shepherding the drug industry welfare legislation known as Medicare Part D through his [...]

This place would be a paradise tomorrow if every department had a supervisor with a submachine gun.
   - Jim Jones on Jonestown

At home, the Obama Justice Department is busy trying to insulate the Bush administration at large and torture memo author John Yoo in particular from the US Geneva Conventions obligation to prosecute war criminals [...]

I was watching Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show yesterday when she ran a story about ten senators joining together to devise a health care sop for liberals who at this point are like beggars in the desert asking not for a drink of water but only for someone to waft a canteen under their noses.
Which [...]

This blog has seen its ups and downs since October of 2003 debut. It went from approximately no readers in the first year to right around a million readers over the course of 2005, after it became the first blog to field its own semi-regular White House correspondent, the inestimable Eric Brewer, who asked some [...]

The way I understand it, mostly from listening to Bob Dylan songs of a certain vintage (“Already confessed/Don’t need to confess again”), once you’ve been washed in the flavorful blood of the Lamb you’re guaranteed passage to Heaven barring a renunciation of it all. Doesn’t matter what you do or say so long as you [...]

Not.
George W. Bush bristles at any attempt to assess his presidency while he’s still alive, never mind in office. By the time history has judged him, he says, we’ll all be dead. But everyone who judged his presidency a disaster before it began — for me the clincher was his disappearance and ashen-faced return [...]

Despite running the worst GOP campaign since Bob Dole’s in 1996 — most people don’t remember that Dole even ran — John McCain managed to confound my expectations and crack 46%, by quite a bit, in the popular vote. This should be instructive for anyone who genuinely believes a new day is dawning in America, [...]

Before I get started, let me first note that one brave newspaper didn’t take the easy out of endorsing one or the other major presidential candidates: the Ann Arbor News flipped them both off. A paper after my own heart in a town I learned to love long, long ago. Except for the weather.
Lots of [...]

I can’t believe anyone believes the CIA when it says that Iran was working toward nuclear weapons for a while but now they’re not. This sounds like they got snookered on the front end and now they’re covering for it. “Oh, shit. They weren’t working on a bomb. What do we do now?” I wonder [...]

I write something pretty good on Monday, drew quite a bit of traffic albeit none generous enough to comment on it, but I remember very little of the piece or the process. Since then my condition has lost more luster and I’m starting to look, rhetorically speaking, like liver left on the counter so long [...]

I have a hat that I call my Gilligan hat, which I often wear in tandem with some dark sunglasses. The past week or so people have been staring at me. No, really: it has gotten to the point where I’m checking to see if my fly is open or I’m drooling or bleeding or [...]

Someone somewhere asked if the wrecked economy would be George W. Bush’s last gasp as president. The answer is, naturally, no: the one rule that best describes the Bush administration, one that we’ve articulated often, is that no matter how bad what we know they’ve done may be, there’s worse to come. Bush and Dick [...]

Despite running the worst GOP campaign since Bob Dole’s single-shoulder-shrug of an effort in 1996, McCain remains in contention for next month’s election. By which I mean he is still alive and not too embarrassed to show himself in public, the latter of which shouldn’t be any surprise because Republicans, and indeed most Democrats as [...]

Excuse us if we doubt that the housing bubble is solely responsible for Armageddon. And indulge us as we point out that a few weeks ago, when the Dow was sitting above 11,000, we bet that it would soon see the wrong side of 8000, a benchmark toward which it has obligingly slid. (Full disclosure: [...]

I’ve been insisting that the total cost of the financial sector bailout will run $3 trillion or more. Turns out that despite a lack of any expertise other than a deeply held and absolute cynicism about Republican governance and financiers of any stripe, I’m in good company. David Leonhardt is pretty sure we’ll get most [...]

There are, to be sure, stark differences between Barack Obama and George Bush. Obama has a pretty good jump shot, for one. And he’s never formally been a cheerleader. It turns out they they have more in common than one might think, and in the unlikely territory of social philosophy.
Back in February of 2005, Bush [...]

As we continue to remind everyone when we write about Wall Street, we don’t know Diddley about finance. Fortunately most stories about Wall Street have way more to do with stupidity and greed than with finance. We know a little something about stupidity and greed.
It’s customary in the US to set aside a small percentage [...]

The press are beginning to notice that they didn’t notice the flames lapping at the financial nation’s ankles these past several years. This is something of a ritual; and a bit of a peculiar one at that, since newspapers have always been much better at reporting what has already happened than what is about to, [...]

Speaking of the Junior League … it may well be the downturn in shopping by consumers whose ears are bleeding from the din of credit card creditors calling night and day that turns what is now termed a “steep recession” into something that everyone can recognize for what it is, which would be a great [...]

I’ve written a lot about the alleged financial crisis afflicting the country, by which is meant Wall Street and investors, but I don’t really care about it beyond the very considerable entertainment value. Some real pain attaches to it, but by the time we hear about that the revolution will be here and the authors [...]

Due to the theft of my computer I wasn’t able to comment in more or less real time on the much larger if less meaningful to me theft of $700 billion $1 trillion from the US Treasury. Yes, it was an inside job. In fact, everyone is on the inside except me and, maybe, you. [...]

Astute readers may have noticed during the past seven-plus years that the government has spent way more money than it has appropriated. That’s not intrinsically a bad thing, but it’s pretty bad when it’s done mostly so that people with a lot of money can have a lot more, and to finance wars, investments that [...]

We wrote recently about the regrettable tendency of New York Times finance writers to predict events inversely; when they say something bad might not happen, it inevitably does; when they say something bad might happen within a few weeks, it seems to happen within a few days.
Much of today’s Times business section is given [...]

Continuing from where we left off, which was with the explanation that however poorly you may think of politicians, you are, unless burdened with a constant and absolutely crushing sense of impending doom, nowhere near the awful truth. The reason politicians get away with what they do is that recognizing what they do is the [...]

Despite my constant exhortation to readers, it’s very likely, to the point of a lock, that voters will not choose to bring on the revolution by electing John McCain and precipitating the simultaneous onsets of facism and the worst depression since the best one. Almost as certain is that among president Obama’s first orders of [...]

I’m monitoring Barack Obama not by listening to anything he or Joe Biden says, but by tracking the sputtering heads bobbing in his wake. I’m no longer reading blogs that appear to be taking either man or the Democratic party seriously, so when I run across something like Digby’s lament of Joe Biden’s elegiac portrait [...]

True to his prosecutorial roots, Vincent Bugliosi gave a concise summation on Thursday of his case against George W. Bush. Bush, says Bugliosi in his new book, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, is responsible for the death of each US soldier killed in Iraq because he lied to Congress and the nation [...]

You don’t try very hard to please me; with what you know it should be easy … this could be the last time, this could be the last time, may be the last time, I don’t know …
If I had an audience large enough, I’d make “The Last Time”, a pre-punk Rolling Stones anthem of [...]

Wesley Clark is held in almost idolatrous regard by a certain class of Democrats, who are now joining other classes — environmentalists, anti-militarists, secularists, civil libertarians and universal health care proponents among them — in a state of increasingly injured puzzlement over Barack Obama’s position on their issues.
The Clark class includes those Democrats who inwardly [...]

The Georgian invasion of South Ossetia, which precipitated a wider conflict between Georgia and Russia, was a move so boneheadedly perverse that it almost certainly has roots in the Bush White House. The Georgians obviously believed that they had sufficient backing from the West, i.e., from the US and its allies in the EU and [...]

Barbara Ehernreich’s most recent blog post relates the suicide of a woman facing foreclosure on her home. Robert Reich’s penultimate post, before he becomes one of the 40% of Americans who can afford to take time off this summer, relates the yet to be fully realized suicide of the American economy.
Reich, the lone leftist/populist [...]

Louie Gohmert, a Republican representative from Texas, has a beef with the Supreme Court: its justices are deciding questions of law. Gohmert — not to be confused with Gomer (Pyle) or Homer (Simpson) — is unhappy with the court’s majority opinion that Guantanamo prisoners are entitled to the constitutionally guaranteed right of habeas corpus, allowing [...]

The worst national security administration ever has a hideous record of ministering to combat troops returning home with psychiatric issues. The military have been slow to recognize and treat post-traumatic stress disorder, and have returned soldiers to combat without treatment. The suicide rate for soldiers who are serving or have served in Afghanistan and Iraq [...]

One of the most unfair aspects of George W. Bush’s foreign policy disasters, not counting the literally millions of people who have been killed, maimed or driven from their homes in direct consequence — we’re not counting them because, let’s face it, for Americans they don’t count — is that he won’t suffer any repercussions [...]

The frothing radical right thinks the New York Times is the frothing radical left, as if such a thing exists in this country in this day, but this is a newspaper that doesn’t speak truth to power even when the power is itself, even after the lights are out, even in the sound-proofed panic room [...]

The Sacramento Bee asks the headlined question and answers, unsurprisingly, “Yes.” Other news outlets have reported the increasing use of criminal history waivers by the Army and the Army National Guard as recruiting became one of the casualties of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, but the Bee is the first to connect the [...]

By “nick,” we mean something along the lines of the Grand Canyon or Marianas Trench. It is a nick into which millions of erstwhile homeowners, along with millions more investors—but no policy makers, so far—have tumbled with barely a trace, unless you count the recession they’re leaving in their wake.
As BTC News more or less [...]

Among the trophy and sporting photos in the December/January issue of Outdoor Life is one showing a pair of US Border Patrol agents rappelling down a boulder-strewn slope. The photo is part of a recruiting ad for the Department of Homeland Security’s US Customs and Border Protection arm, and it was spotted by one of [...]