From AlterNet
By Bernie Sanders

Ted Kennedy will go down in history as one of the giants of the U.S. Senate and one the most accomplished legislators in American history. He will also be remembered, by those who knew him, as an extremely warm and caring human being whose public service was a brilliant reflection of his love and devotion to his country, his friends and his family.

As a member of the Senate health and education committee, chaired by Senator Kennedy, I was always impressed by his intelligence, knowledge and seriousness of purpose. His career in public service was driven by a deep sense of compassion and a belief that, in this great country, every American should be entitled to quality health care, education and other basic needs as well as equal justice under the law.

His passion was that every single American has health care as a right of citizenship. He understood that there was something lacking in our country today when we remained the only nation in the industrialized world that does not provide health care to all people.

At the end of the day, his view was that nobody should be left behind whether it was in health care, whether it was education, whether it was poverty in America. He felt very strongly about that.

Ted Kennedy devoted his lifetime to protecting those most in need, and tens of millions of Americans have been the beneficiaries. His absence from the Senate leaves an enormous void. His colleagues and the nation will miss him greatly.

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From TruthDig
By Joe Conason

Predictably as always, the Republicans in Congress and in the conservative media are berating Attorney General Eric Holder for deciding to investigate the CIA’s use of abusive interrogation methods on terror suspects.

They warn that probing this sensitive history will compromise intelligence operations and endanger the nation. They insist that these techniques have, in the words of former Vice President Dick Cheney, saved thousands and perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives. They suggest that the attorney general should simply ignore the evidence of illegal conduct and “investigate the terrorists instead,” as if the Justice Department cannot do both.

But as those politicians and pundits ought to understand by now, the American system of justice was always meant to do both—that is, to apprehend and prosecute criminals, and to ensure that those who apprehend them do not violate the law in doing so. That system routinely investigates law enforcement officials who use excessive force because we recognize that the credibility and authority of the law depends on universal accountability.

Voices on the right have often protested prosecutions of police officers and sheriffs because, they claim, such accountability will lead to higher crime. Yet in fact, the declining crime rates of the past three decades have coincided with stronger efforts to ensure that the police observe the rights of suspects and avoid the use of undue violence.

By the same principle, any nation that professes to live under constitutional governance must be able to ensure that its intelligence professionals observe relevant laws, including the international treaties that ban torture and abuse of prisoners. There is nothing in the U.S. Constitution, even the president’s wartime authority, that permits the chief executive and his minions to assume dictatorial power. So the attorney general must investigate abuses committed in their name.

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From Salon
By Glenn Greenwald

If anyone ever tells you that they don’t understand what is meant by “stenography journalism” — or ever insists that America is plagued by a Liberal Media — you can show them this article from today’s Washington Post and, by itself, it should clear up everything. The article’s headline is “How a Detainee Became An Asset — Sept. 11 Plotter Cooperated After Waterboarding” — though an equally appropriate headline would be: “The Joys and Virtues of Torture — how Dick Cheney Kept Us Safe.” I defy anyone to identify a single way the article would be different if The Post had let Dick Cheney write it himself. The next time someone laments the economic collapse of the modern American newspaper, one might point out that an industry which pays three separate reporters (Peter Finn, Joby Warrick and Julie Tate) and numerous editors to churn out mindless, inane tripe like this has brought about its own demise.

Here’s the essence of the article, presented — in terms of tone, length and placement — as a Vital New Scoop:

After enduring the CIA’s harshest interrogation methods and spending more than a year in the agency’s secret prisons, Khalid Sheik Mohammed stood before U.S. intelligence officers in a makeshift lecture hall, leading what they called “terrorist tutorials” . . . .

These scenes provide previously unpublicized details about the transformation of the man known to U.S. officials as KSM from an avowed and truculent enemy of the United States into what the CIA called its “preeminent source” on al-Qaeda. This reversal occurred after Mohammed was subjected to simulated drowning and prolonged sleep deprivation, among other harsh interrogation techniques. . . .

[F]or defenders of waterboarding, the evidence is clear: Mohammed cooperated, and to an extraordinary extent, only when his spirit was broken in the month after his capture March 1, 2003, as the inspector general’s report and other documents released this week indicate.

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From The Consortium News
By Ray McGovern

It seems coverage of the Bush administration’s “war on terror” has been put back on track by the editors of the Washington Post and their “sources” who are determined to highlight the supposed successes of waterboarding and other forms of torture.

Frankly, I was wondering when this return to form would happen at the Post. I was surprised to see Post journalists recently lose their grip, so to speak, and fall into the practice of reporting real facts — like the sickening revelations in the long-suppressed CIA Inspector General’s report on torture.

Apparently they have now been reminded of the biases of the newspaper’s top brass, forever justifying the hardnosed “realism” of the Bush administration as it approved brutal and perverse methods for stripping the “bad guys” of their clothes, their dignity, their sense of self – all to protect America.

Hooded, threatened with a cocked gun and an electric drill, deprived of sleep for long periods, beaten, kept naked or dressed in diapers, forced into painful stress positions, locked in tiny boxes and subjected to the near-drowning of waterboarding, the terrorism suspects were supposed to be terrorized into what the CIA psychologists called “learned helplessness.”

And to read the Washington Post’s account, it all worked, transforming alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed from a “truculent enemy” into what the CIA considered its “preeminent source” on al-Qaeda.

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From Newsweek
By Sharon Begley

To the credit of opponents of health-care reform, the lies and exaggerations they’re spreading are not made up out of whole cloth—which makes the misinformation that much more credible. Instead, because opponents demand that everyone within earshot (or e-mail range) look, say, “at page 425 of the House bill!,” the lies take on a patina of credibility. Take the claim in one chain e-mail that the government will have electronic access to everyone’s bank account, implying that the Feds will rob you blind. The 1,017-page bill passed by the House Ways and Means Committee does call for electronic fund transfers—but from insurers to doctors and other providers. There is zero provision to include patients in any such system. Five other myths that won’t die:

You’ll have no choice in what health benefits you receive.

The myth that a “health choices commissioner” will decide what benefits you get seems to have originated in a july 19 post at blog.flecksoflife.com, whose homepage features an image of Obama looking like heath ledger’s joker. In fact, the house bill sets up a health-care exchange—essentially a list of private insurers and one government plan—where people who do not have health insurance through their employer or some other source (including small businesses) can shop for a plan, much as seniors shop for a drug plan under medicare part d. The government will indeed require that participating plans not refuse people with preexisting conditions and offer at least minimum coverage, just as it does now with employer-provided insurance plans and part d. The requirements will be floors, not ceilings, however, in that the feds will have no say in how generous private insurance can be.

No chemo for older medicare patients.

The threat that medicare will give cancer patients over 70 only end-of-life counseling and not chemotherapy—as a nurse at a hospital told a roomful of chemo patients, including the uncle of a NEWSWEEK reporter—has zero basis in fact. It’s just a vicious form of the rationing scare. The house bill does not use the word “ration.” Nor does it call for cost-effectiveness research, much less implementation—the idea that “it isn’t cost-effective to give a 90-year-old a hip replacement.”

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From The Free Press
By Pete Johnson

The protests against health insurance reform has laid bare the war between the oligarchy (Ruling Class) against the citizenry. Obama should have described the health insurance problem as class warfare in order to focus the debate. Now, the corporate powers have unleashed a barrage of attacks, most of which are simply false (death panels, abortion payments). The ruling class media eliminated the single payer debate at the outset, and has since limited the discussion from the necessary step of a public option. By the time you read this the public option will be a dead issue. Instead the propaganda machine (TV) is focusing on the false debate created by industry and the ruling class resulting in an apparent fight between right and left, when the fight should be against the ruling class.

Thom Hartman correctly pointed out that the angry people on the right and the angry people on the left are angry at the same thing: corporate power. Everyone feels the American way of life is slipping quickly away. Our children can no longer expect to achieve the standard of living that we older folks enjoyed during our lifetime. NAFTA did what the populist critics expected it to do when passed in 1993: which is to lower the standard of living and enrich the ruling class. Ross Perot predicted the “giant sucking sound” of job loss. On the heals of NAFTA, corporations gained more power when the banks were deregulated during the Clinton administration (repeal of Glass Steagall Act). This lead to a near total meltdown of our economic system in 2008. The fix was to have the taxpayers fund the losses. The first TARP request was $800,000 million dollars, eventually turning into $296 billion spent of $350 billion allocated. Subsequent to bailout, Citigroup reported a 2nd quarter profit of $3 billion. Even those who still believe that unrestrained predatory capitalism is the greatest (or only) economic system can see that the Citigroup profits should belong to the taxpayer but instead is money that has been transferred from the taxpayer to the Ruling Class. You would think that a longer time frame would have been necessary to disguise this theft, but when you control the “news”, you don’t even have to hide your crimes.

Obama will find it impossible to take on the ruling class if he allows them to choose the terrain of the battlefield. Like Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg, the enemy holds the high ground. But American presidents have challenged the Oligarchy in the past. Franklin D. Roosevelt was raised in a wealthy family but famously challenged the “Economic Royalists”. (see: Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’). FDR fashioned social security, which brought on charges of “socialist” and the wrath of the oligarchy. For his trouble, the ruling class decided to overthrow his government via a military coup known as the Business Plot in 1934, but the plot was thwarted by General Smedley Butler.

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From Crooks and Liars
By Heather

Chuck Todd got called out on Real Time by Jeremy Scahill for calling investigations into torture “political catnip”. Apparently Todd has taken no lessons from his back and forth with Glenn Greenwald on the issue since he was still as defensive as ever when someone with well more than an ounce of journalistic integrity calls him out for his lack of it.

Todd went on Morning Joe defending Cheney, and Glenn Greenwald ripped him for the same thing Scahill took him to task for on Real Time:

NBC’s Chuck Todd — who, remember, is billed as a reporter covering the White House, not a pundit expressing opinions — was on MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Tuesday discussing reports that Eric Holder is likely to appoint a prosecutor to investigate Bush torture crimes. Needless to say, everyone agreed without question that investigations were a ridiculous distraction from what really matters and would be terribly unfair. This, along with Mika Brzezinski and Pat Buchanan, is what Todd argued after he was asked about the Holder story and the Cheney/CIA story (video is below):

Todd: Look, let’s take all of these stories in one big thing: really, the only important thing — the most important thing — the President has to focus on is getting the public’s trust on the economy, and pushing health care. Cheney, the CIA, and in some respects Sotomayor are cable catnip –

Brzezinski: Yep.

Todd: It’s news catnip – but they’re sort of clouding the two most important issues the President’s got to get his arms around this week: winning back trust of the middle on the economy and pushing health care through.

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From Common Wonders
By Robert C. Koehler

It’s like truth or dare. And it’s legal.

Get your permit or whatever and you, too, can bring an assault rifle to the next presidential speech you attend. There’s nothing the police can do — amazing! If only the Democrats, back when George Bush was president, had known there was a safe, legal way to protest presidential policy and register discontent with the direction the country was headed. Can you imagine?

I ponder the phenomenon of gun speech — the amplified malevolence of the inarticulate — and hope, pray that it fizzles out quickly in its current manifestation: as a presence at town hall meetings on health care, at appearances by President Obama, at any random venue in which the nation’s future is being discussed. I fear, however, that this is going to catch on, and if it does, well . . . the line in the sand has been drawn. At what point did public sanity cease to be a value?

Consider what life was like, oh, let’s say five years ago. Here’s a slice of news from July 4, 2004:

Nicole and Jeff Rank were arrested in Charleston, W.Va. — handcuffed, hustled away, charged with trespassing — because they were wearing T-shirts that said “Love America, Hate Bush” on the grounds of the state capitol on the day George Bush was scheduled to make a speech there. The Charleston Gazette further reported that those who applied for tickets to hear Bush’s speech “were required to supply their names, addresses, birth dates, birthplaces and Social Security numbers.”

That was then: “Free speech zones” were the norm; protesters were routinely whisked out of sight at every Bush appearance, even though, you know, we have a First Amendment and all.

This is now: A dozen guys with guns gathered outside a convention center in Phoenix on Monday as President Obama spoke. At least two of them had assault rifles slung over their shoulders. “Phoenix police said the men carrying guns at Monday’s event did not need permits, as the state of Arizona has an ‘open carry’ law,” the U.K. Telegraph reported. “No crimes were committed, and no one was arrested.”

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From The Raw Story
By Muriel Kane

The long-delayed release of a CIA inspector general’s report has been scooped by Newsweek, which obtained details from one source who has read a draft of the report and another who was briefed on its contents.

A version of the report with newly declassified details is expected to be released on Monday.

According to Newsweek’s sources, the report will reveal that the CIA interrogators of suspected USS Cole bomber Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri brandished a gun in front of him in an attempt to make him believe he was going to be shot — thus violating a federal law against threatening a detainee with “imminent death” — and also threatened him with a power drill.

In other cases, mock executions were staged, including one case in which a gun was fired in an adjoining room to make a suspect believe another prisoner had been shot.

The report was commissioned by then-CIA Director George Tenet in 2004, as CIA officials attempted to determine whether the use of “enhanced” interrogation techniques had followed official guidelines. It was shared at the time with the Justice Department and with selected members of the Congressional oversight committees and was shown to the committees as a whole in 2006, but has been kept secret from the public.

The government is now required to turn the report over on Monday as a result of an ACLU Freedom of Information lawsuit. Related documents are to be revealed a week later.

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From In These Times
By David Sirota

Those of us living in the Rocky Mountain region are steeped in America’s famous gun culture—and we therefore know well the binary debates surrounding the Second Amendment. Firearm enthusiasts—the vast majority of whom use weapons responsibly—believe the Constitution protects their right to bear arms. Gun control advocates counter that the Constitution doesn’t give anyone the inalienable right to wield automatic weapons that can kill scores of people in seconds.

This is the stultified freedom-versus-safety quarrel that seemed to forever define gun politics—that is, until anti-government activists started bringing firearms to public political meetings.

In early August, a protester came to a raucous Tennessee congressional forum packing heat. Days later, President Obama’s health care event in New Hampshire was marred by a protester posing for cameras with a pistol and sign reading, “It is time to water the tree of liberty”—a reference to a Thomas Jefferson quote promising violence. And this past week,12 armed men—including one with an assault rifle—not only showed off their firearms at Obama’s Arizona speech, but broadcast a YouTube video threatening to “forcefully resist people imposing their will on us through the strength of the majority.”

These and other similar examples are accurately summarized with the same language federal law employs to describe domestic terrorism. Generating maximum media attention, the weapons-brandishing displays are “intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population.” Yes, the gun has been transformed from a sport and self-defense device into a tool of mass bullying. Like the noose in the Jim Crow South, its symbolic message is clear: If you dare engage in the democratic process, you risk bodily harm.

With that implicit threat, the incessant arguments about gun ownership have been supplanted by a more significant debate over which should take precedence: The Constitution’s First or Second Amendment?

Based on America’s history, the Founders’ answer to that question clearly lies in the Bill of Rights’ deliberate sequencing.

The First Amendment ethos guarantees people—whatever their politics—a fundamental right to participate in their democracy without concern for physical retribution. It is the primary amendment because America was first and foremost created not as a gun-owners’ haven, but as a place to shelter citizens from oppression.

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