Want to know what I’m reading each day? Who I trust, and from where I draw my opinions about the myriad issues facing our nation and our world today? No? Well, fine then. But if you change your mind, you can check out my personal reading list here.
See something I’m missing? Got any suggestions? Pass them on. I’m always looking for a new, smart blogger to capture my attention.
And for the record (and I’ve said this before), I highly recommend Bloglines for anyone that wishes to cover a lot of material efficiently. I frankly couldn’t read as much as I do without it. It’s not perfect; there are some sites that will still be better to visit manually than to simply read their RSS feeds — Daily Kos is a particularly notable one, but overall, it’s a massive time saver and a great way to organize your library of blogs.
CIA Director Leon Panetta told lawmakers in a recent briefing that the intelligence agency he heads misled Congress on “significant actions” for a “number of years,” a group of Democrats revealed on Wednesday.
In a letter written to Panetta on June 26 by seven Democratic members of the House Intelligence Committee, the CIA chief is urged to “publicly correct” an earlier statement he made in which he insisted that it was not agency policy to mislead Congress.
As the letter details, Panetta apparently acknowledged in an earlier briefing that this statement was not, in fact, true.
Not that this comes as a surprise or anything. I love — in the most horrible sense of the word — the final sentence: this statement was not, in fact, true. But I guess publishing the word horse shit might come across as less than objective.
Anyone want to take bets on just which “significant actions” these were?
From a diary at Kos. There are simply no words needed to describe this video in which Brian Kilmeade offers his theory that Swedish people have lower rates of Alzheimer’s disease because of their “pure genes.”
You know you’ve gone off the deep end when the obligatory cute, blonde co-host looks at you like you’re crazy.
A double header today. First, the first track from Mos Def’s fantastic album, “The Ecstatic.” Check out the rocking, energetic, “Supermagic.” Sorry, but there’s no official video for it, so the video itself is just a static image of the album cover. But the song will kick your ass:
And on a completely different note, here’s ivy league band Vampire Weekend’s second track from their eponymous debut, “Oxford Comma.” Because seriously, who does give a fuck about an Oxford comma?
When the CBO scored a very incomplete health care proposal and concluded that it would cost a trillion dollars over 10 years and leave more than 30 million Americans uninsured, the Right jumped on it as proof positive that the Adminstration’s plan was wasteful spending that would fail to address the root problem.
Now, the CBO has scored the HELP bill (which contains a public insurance option and pay-or-play mandates for employers), and concluded that it will cost $600 billion over ten years and cover 97% of Americans. Two weeks ago, the CBO was one of the most important voices in the health care debate. Anyone care to guess whether the Republicans will still tout their findings now that the bill includes a public option and a pay-or-play mandate, which both greatly reduce the cost of the program? Somehow I doubt it.
Certainly to those of you who still drop by here once in a while, it’s become apparent that the pace of posts at The Left Anchor has slowed dramatically in the months since the election. I’m currently considering new directions for this blog to take. I’ve not come to any full decisions about what this blog will become; I only know that things are going to change in order for this to stay interesting to me. And really, what is a blog if not a forum for total naval gazing? It’s really all about me, isn’t it?
What I think is that I’m going to take this site off the beaten path. Stories that you can find elsewhere — Kos, TPM, or the like — will probably no longer be found here, save for exceptional cases. Instead, you’ll find smaller, more niche stories, and other oddities, which will hopefully make for a more interesting experience for me and a more enjoyable reading experience for you. Because really, how many takes do you need on any given day’s mini-scandal? This will, of course, remain a blog focused largely on government and politics, but more of my outside interests will find their way into the daily rotation – physics and astronomy, poetry, film and music reviews, and swear words… because I love me some swear words.
I thought I’d take the time to lay down my thoughts on the whole what-did-Pelosi-know-and-when-did-she-know-it-gate scandal. First, I find it odd that this side story has taken center stage in a discussion that should be focusing on the who, what, and why’s of America’s torture policy in the aftermath of 9/11 and the lead up to the Iraq war. To that end, I think even Democrats should be able to agree that Pelosi’s comments on the matter could have been better phrased, or even better yet, avoided. This is only a story because she gave the Right something to grab on to and Democrats have done a shit job handling the issue.
That said, it doesn’t seem to me that the CIA has offered anything that necessarily contradicts Pelosi’s statements. While there are memos that state Pelosi was briefed on more than she admitted too, even the CIA isn’t standing behind the accuracy of those memos, calling them, “best recollections,” which were assembled after the fact. But even if they are accurate, what is Pelosi being accused of? Hypocrisy?
Let’s use this as an opportunity to get Republicans to sign off on a truth comission and drag all of this out into the light. But I’m more interested in who authorized what, when, and why than I am of Congress’ role. I get it, they dropped the ball and the leadership in both parties look pretty bad now. If you don’t support torture, that is.
A must-read article from GQ. It’s a very raw account of Rumsfeld’s time in the White House as told by those who worked with him. The short version is Donald Rumsfeld is an incredible asshole and was a recklessly negligent defense secretary. Religious verses decorating the covers of Defense reports, preventing the military tribunals from trying detainees, and holding back active soldiers stationed in America during Hurricane Katrina, relying instead on the slower guard troops to arrive are just a few of his “achievements.”
I have one basic thought on Souter’s decision to retire from the Supreme Court. Or perhaps I should say I have one thought on the timing of Souter’s exit: Souter must have very little respect for Justices Alito and Roberts. Otherwise, why choose to retire so early into a new administration, especially when he’s not facing any known health problems? Certainly he must have been considering retiring even before Obama’s election. And certainly he must have known that Obama would appoint a judge with far more moderate tendancies than Alito or Roberts. It seems to me that there’s a very solid case to be made that he did not want to retire and leave Bush free to appoint a third justice.
Tim Fernholz coins a phrase which does a great job of separating Obama’s economic view from that of conservatives:
For conservatives, there is never a bad time to cut taxes, whether you’re in a surplus or a deficit, a boom or a bust; for Obama and other liberals, economics needs to be context-driven, and in this context (a severe recession) deficit spending is what gets us out. Obama hasn’t made the argument that we should have a deficit all the time. The real crux of this argument is that Obama has, by necessity, put off a lot of deficit-reduction measures until we see some kind of economic recovery.
Yeah, when your economic philosophy calls for the exact same solution to all economic problems — cut taxes, de-regulate — then you don’t really have an economic philosophy in the first place. You just have two dogmatic rules. It’s actually kind of surprising that Republicans managed to carry that message for as long as they did, although I guess they never had to make their arguments in the face of a recession like the one we’re seeing now. In that context, the shallowness of their economic ideology is laid bare, and it looks a lot less appealing in the cruel light of day.
