Punishing the guilty for deeds they committed in the past is the only way to show the world that we are truly on a new path.

In a week when one-year report cards on the Obama administration were piling up and not all the grades were good, Americans searching for the real change we heard so much about on Obama’s campaign trail were hit with some news that would send his grades plummeting. Late last Friday, we learned that Obama’s Department of Justice plans to go easy on John Yoo and Jay Bybee — the two assistant attorney generals under Bush who penned the infamous torture memos. For those who have been working long and hard in the accountability movement to make sure no one — not even presidents or their top advisors — is above the law, this was a serious setback.

As part of that movement, I was appalled. Not just because I want to see those who committed crimes in office punished rather than excused. Not just because I want to see the Obama White House restore accountability to government rather than cover up crimes committed by the former administration. And not just because Yoo and Bybee memo’d-up legal opinions stating that torture techniques as egregious and illegal as waterboarding were acceptable. No, there is a deeper question in play here: Why were they really asked to render these opinions in the first place?

Full Story Why We Can’t Afford to Let Obama Give Bush’s War Criminals a Free Pass | Civil Liberties | AlterNet.

With the submission of the Obama administration’s budget today, fiscal silly season is opening. President Obama already launched an opening salvo last week with his proposed freeze on non-security-related military spending, which amounts to a rounding error on the ten-year budget projections, which are themselves a rounding error on the long-term budget projections — at a time when unemployment is running at 10.0 percent. Fortunately, there is a partial saving grace, which is that the freeze does not set until fiscal year 2011 (which begins in October 2010), and in the meantime Obama has proposed $100 billion in tax cuts and government spending to create jobs. (Whether his proposals are the right way to spend $100 billion is a debate for another time.)

The midterm elections are looming already (note: do we have to be satisfied with a political system in which the legislature is preoccupied with upcoming elections half the time?), and the two big themes seem to be jobs and the deficit. With unemployment at levels not seen since the 1980s, it’s obvious why jobs are on the political agenda. With the federal budget deficit at record (nominal) levels, it also seems obvious that the deficit should be on the agenda, but this is really an unfortunate artifact of our political system. A government deficit is the result of insufficient government saving, and a period of high unemployment is absolutely the worst time to increase government saving. The sensible solution would be to use the urgency we currently feel to put in place long-term fiscal solutions, but the political system can’t handle that (see health care reform as Exhibit A). As a result, when deficits go up, we get lots of short-term politicking about the deficit-in Paul Krugman’s words, the “march of the deficit peacocks.”

Full Story James Kwak: Budget Sense and Nonsense.

OPS:  many us us were calling it a stampede

The court decision completely ignores the likelihood that corporations will spend money to elect officials who will do their bidding, and punish those who won’t. It allows unlimited election spending by all corporations, even foreign ones. “The Supreme Court has decided to protect the rights of GE, Volkswagen, Lukoil and Aramco, at the expense of our right to good government,” Grayson added.

Congressman Grayson was in the courtroom when the U.S. Supreme Court announced its decision. Grayson circulated a petition yesterday, saying: “Unlimited corporate spending on campaigns means the government is up for sale, and that the law itself will be bought and sold.” Within hours, more than 10,000 people had signed the petition. Rep. Grayson delivered those petitions to the Court this morning.

Full Story GRAYSON CONDEMNS COURT RULING | Congressman Alan Grayson, Representing the 8th District of Florida.

Tuesday’s Republican victory in the Massachusetts special election means that Democrats can’t send a modified health care bill back to the Senate. That’s a shame because the bill that would have emerged from House-Senate negotiations would have been better than the bill the Senate has already passed. But the Senate bill is much, much better than nothing. And all that has to happen to make it law is for the House to pass the same bill, and send it to President Obama’s desk.

Right now, Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, says that she doesn’t have the votes to pass the Senate bill. But there is no good alternative.

Full Story Op-Ed Columnist – Do the Right Thing – NYTimes.com.

Michael LeRoy says he found evidence that judges’ rulings are being swayed by campaign contributions from businesses, based on a new study of more than 200 state court cases. The study will appear in the Iowa Law Review.

He predicts justice would tip even more out of balance if the Supreme Court strikes down limits on election spending in a high-stakes challenge to the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reforms Act of 2002, commonly known as the McCain-Feingold bill.

Full Story On The Hill: Looming High Court Ruling Could Taint Justice, Legal Expert Says.

OPS:  This is the final assault on the American form of Democracy. If they do this – everything changes. Fascism comes out of the closet

Lloyd Doggett’s town hall on health care in Austin last week was one of the first such events that got national attention because of the outrageously thuggish tactics employed by the Teabagger mob. At the time, the media coverage suggested this was a spontaneous protest.

We now know that isn’t true.

A Gazette reporter was there to witness an unruly hollering mob of people disrupt the meeting and personally insult Congressman Doggett. Conservative cable news and talk radio stations around the country hailed the event as a spontaneous outbreak of opposition to proposed healthcare reform. But it was later discovered that the Travis County Republican Party Chair had led an organizing effort to disrupt the event…

These people were Republican ringers, period. Keep in mind that Travis County went for Obama. This is hardly a right-wing stronghold.

There’s a lot of good reporting in this article — but this exchange is really important.

Congressman Doggett stressed that opponents of healthcare reform are also the opponents of Social Security and Medicare, which he said have worked “very successfully.”

He added: “Near the beginning of the session…because they were holding up all these Tenth Amendment signs, I was saying, ‘Well, if that’s your attitude about health care, then I suppose you don’t really support Social Security and Medicare,’” Doggett said. “And they said, ‘Yes, we don’t. We don’t think they’re good.’”

via Firedoglake » Two Key Details Emerge about Mob at Now Notorious Lloyd Doggett Town Hall.

FreedomWorks advocates people being ‘aggressive’ at town hall meetings. – Think Progress »

This morning on MSNBC, The Wonk Room’s Igor Volsky and FreedomWorks President Matt Kibbe discussed the astroturf campaign many right-wing groups (including FreedomWorks) are engaged in to disrupt health care town hall meetings across the country with members of Congress. Igor noted that these groups are “very good at tapping into that paranoid place in American politics that we saw at the end of the 2008 election when people were coming to McCain’s town halls and calling President Obama a terrorist, a socialist.” When pressed by host Alex Witt if his organization is encouraging people to be disruptive, Kibbe at first dodged the question, but said that “shouting is not the way to get this done.” He then, however, admitted that FreedomWorks urges people to be “agressive”:

HOST: So you are not encouraging, do you want to tell me definitively, you have not encouraged your members in FreedomWorks to show up at these town hall meetings and be disruptive? [...]

KIBBE: Shouting is not the way to get this done. The right thing to do is to be aggressive, get to the microphone, express your opinion, but let the congressman talk as well. That’s always been our position.

Watch it:

via Think Progress » FreedomWorks advocates people being ‘aggressive’ at town hall meetings..

How the health-care industry, the GOP and one media mogul made common cause with the anti-government fringe.

The recent spate of town hall dustups may look like an overnight sensation, but they’ve been years, even decades, in the making.

Since the days in the late 1970s, when the New Right began its takeover of the Republican Party, it has cultivated a militia of white people armed with a grudge against those who brought forth the social changes of the ’60s.

These malcontents have been promised their day of retribution, a day for which they are more than ready. Few seem to understand that they are merely dupes for a corporate agenda that will only worsen the conditions in which they live.

Why, you may ask, would men of power and fame shake the rough, unmanicured hands of gun enthusiasts, conspiracy theorists, gay-haters, misogynists and racists?

via Inside Story on Town Hall Riots: Right-Wing Shock Troops Do Corporate America’s Dirty Work | Politics | AlterNet.