Gasping for breath

The deluge is not over, but the worst of it has passed, and I now have a wee bit of breathing space. So, let’s see, what has happened while I’m gone? Nothing good, it seems:

• Man, Poland just cannot catch a break.
• Not only are we whacking American citizens without due process, we’re having interagency spats about who gets to do it.
• A federal appeals court rules against the FCC on Net neutrality, but the FCC seems to think there may be more than one way to skin a cat. It’s pushing ahead with (what appears to this layperson to be) well-thought-out broadband regulation, and when its critics lie, it is aggressively calling them out. Which is good, because there’s nothing riding on this except the future health of the economy.
• I’m beginning to think it would be wrong to call the accidental killings of civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq isolated incidents.
• The most scathing, incisive criticism of the teabaggers I’ve seen yet turns up in, of all places, a forum dedicated to motorcycling. (h/t: DougJ at Balloon Juice) And here’s some research backing up the poster’s thesis.
• Washington is up to its usual sound and fury on financial reform, but if “reform” doesn’t 1) get taxpayers completely off the hook for commercial banks’ losses and 2) hold the ratings agencies accountable for their role in the current disaster, then it will be meaningless.
• Colin Powell’s former chief of staff claims Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld knew in 2002 that a majority of Guantanamo detainees were innocent but wouldn’t release them because admitting they’d screwed up on that scale would be politically disastrous. And how sad it is that all I can muster in response is, “Well, duh.“
• Dawn Johnsen withdraws from consideration to be head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. This is a huge loss for the country, which desperately needs someone of her integrity in that position. And perhaps I’m wrong, but I think it shows Obama intends to head right down the trail of illegality blazed by his predecessor. (Because there are, and always have been, 60 votes for her confirmation, if Obama really wanted her. (Glenn Greenwald, who knows a lot more about this than I do, agrees with me, as does Jason Linkins.)
• From 1983 to 2007, in constant dollars, the average wealth of the wealthiest 1% of U.S. households went from about $7.9 million to $17.1 million. During the same period, the average wealth of the middle 20% of households — the middlest of the middle class — went from $15,600 to $26,000. But … but … class war!
• Tim Geithner says unemployment will remain “unacceptably high” for a long time, a fact about which he intends to do … nothing. I’m guessing he and I have different definitions of “unacceptable.”
• A court says that if the government doesn’t want to try to prove it had a legal reason for an otherwise illegal case of wiretapping, then the wiretapping victim wins. Moreover, the judge rules that although George W. Bush claimed that the Authorization for Use of Military Force enacted after 9/11 allowed him to disregard the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, George W. Bush was wrong. So, for the record, a federal district judge has ruled that a sitting president of the United States committed a felony. Don’t all y’all go arrest him at once, now.
• Westboro Baptist Church — the lunatics who believe bad things happen to America because we’re not crucifying gays fast enough, or something — went to do their thing in West Virginia on the occasion of the 29 coal miners dying. And the good people of West Virginia were simply not in the mood.
• I have no idea who Cord Jefferson is, let alone what possessed him to go back and listen to the radio propaganda that motivated Hutus to massacre Tutsis in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. But he did. Not only that, he compared it with transcripts from Glenn Beck. Yeah, context and all, but damn, those are some creepy parallels.
• ABC News outsources journalism.
• Memo to Fulton, Mississippi: All Constance McMullen wanted to do was take her girlfriend to the prom. But no. I hope you held your head high in church today. I also hope you’re not mistaking yourselves for grownups.
• Mines are going to keep blowing up until the CEOs that run them are brought up on manslaughter charges. Seriously. I guarandamntee you that fines alone are not going to stop this slow-motion genocide.
• In Florida, at least, a boatload of attempted foreclosures may be based on fraudulent documents. Color me surprised.
• U.S. forces murdered a wounded Reuters journalist and a couple of his would-be rescuers in cold blood and then lied about it. And nothing, but nothing, is going to happen as a result. John Cole, relatedly, points out that the Secret War in Laos was no secret to the Laotians, so to speak: American media may shield Americans from this stuff, but in other parts of the world people know which way the wind blows. (Even if the Pentagon “lost” its copy of the video.)
• Sara Robinson asks a damn good question: Conservatives, are you with America or not?
• Erick Erickson opens his mouth and removes all doubt as CNN apparently joins the Wall Street Journal op-ed page in requiring its contributors to have had lobotomies.
• The Pope hisownself has been sheltering pedophile priests. Resign already, you criminal. And the pope’s own priest compares criticism of the Church over pedophilia to the Holocaust. Oh, yes, he did.
• Big banks caught lying to public. Again. (Memo to Congressional Democrats playing at “banking reform”: Either you fix this problem for reals or voters, including this one, are going to hang the next crash around your necks.)
• One of the more ridiculous defenses of waterboarding was that we did it to our own troops in training and it didn’t hurt them. The issue of training vs. real world aside, that training did, in fact, hurt some of them.
• If you want to spread the federal income-tax burden more broadly, you’re going to need to spread income more broadly. Just sayin’.
• Matt Taibbi takes a break from gutting the vampire squid to put his finger on one of the many things I don’t like about David Brooks.
• We’re getting old, and by “we,” I mean “humans.”

I have no idea when I’ll be back, so this’ll have to do ya for a while.