The news that senior Bush administration officials not only approved the use of torture but actually micromanaged the application of it should be the last straw for dithering Democrats in the House of Representatives.

We have known for years that the president and the vice president approved war crimes, including torture, on the basis of legal opinions provided by Justice Department functionaries authorizing the president to break any law in the name of national security. Now we know that Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and other top officials dictated specific combinations of outlawed interrogation techniques—including waterboarding and physical beatings—for specific prisoners.

One of the great tragedies of the Bush administration is the lassitude, often appearing to shade into cowardice, displayed by those in opposition to it. The Democratic leadership in Congress refuses to consider impeachment as an option for dealing with a transparently criminal president and vice president, and very few major voices on the liberal end of the spectrum have chided them for it. Liberal blogging powerhouse Atrios today called Rice and company "monsters" and "war criminals" who should all be in jail for their actions; what, then, does that make House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers and others who have the option of at least attempting to evict the monsters from the national house but have failed to act?

ABC News is reporting that senior Bush administration officials were intimately involved in planning torture regimens for use against terrorism suspects. The officials include vice president Dick Cheney; CIA director George Tenet and his successor, former CIA agent and Congressman Porter Goss; then-national security advisor Condoleezza Rice; former secretary of state Colin Powell; former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld; and former attorney general John Ashcroft. All were members of the Principals Committee of president Bush's national security council.

I ask who among our current-day political leaders Martin Luther King might support; the more appropriate question is who among them would have the courage to embrace a living King as eagerly as they drape themselves in the dead one's memory. I'm drawing a blank.

Much of the commentary on the anniversary of King's assassination focuses upon the direction he took in the last years of his life, speaking out against the Vietnam war specifically and state-sponsored violence in general, and attempting to broaden the movement that coalesced around him to include economically oppressed people of every color, not just the racially oppressed ones for whom he advocated so powerfully. He wanted to recast the political and social values of the country to the benefit not just of the disenfranchised here, but for those abroad who suffered from our own and similar military and corporate depredations.

My own Obama speech moment: as I was walking home late on the night of the speech, I ran across four black teenagers, probably 15 or 16 years old. They started to cross the street as I approached. As we passed in opposite directions I heard one of them say, "You see that Charlie Manson-looking motherfucker? Why they let serial killers walk around this time of night?"

My first reaction was to think, "Jeebus. Do all brown haired, bearded white men look alike?" But afterward, when I looked up a Manson photograph and considered the circumstances—the late hour, the ghoulish complexion modern street lamps lend to white people—I thought, "No wonder they crossed the street." Then I went on to contemplate Manson's enduring cross-cultural appeal.

I didn't read the speech or many reactions to it until yesterday, when the various narratives were well formed. There seems to have been considerable anticipation that Obama would throw someone under a bus, either himself or his pastor, Jeremiah Wright. In the aftermath, the consensus on the right seems to be that he threw his elderly white grandmother under the bus, although there doesn't seem to be much realization that they, the outraged horde, are the bus, and that they had to drive crazier than Keanu Reeves in Speed to pick off grandma.

George W. Bush has a death grip on the title of Worst US President Ever, but he's not alone in achieving historic levels of incompetence: his cabinet secretaries are pulling their weight as well.

Take Condoleeza Rice, for instance. As Bush's national security council chief, she presided over the administration's total lack of interest in counter-terrorism activities. It was Rice, you'll recall, who referred in testimony before the 9/11 commission to the Presidential Daily Brief entitled "Bin Laden Determined To Strike In US" as a "historical document" unworthy of notice.

Today, we receive official notice that as secretary of state, Rice set out to do for diplomacy what she did for national security. Vanity Fair has the documentary scoop on a scheme concoted by Rice and Iran-Contra convict Elliot Abrams to provoke a civil war in Palestine between the military wings of Hamas, the democratically elected ruling party much loathed by the Bush administration, and Fatah, the electoral losers who were loathed by the administration when in power but gained respectability by virtue of losing.

John McCain's campaign bus, the Straight Talk Express, has officially become a rolling punch line to the joke of the GOP presidential primaries.

There has simply never been a primary for either major party as ridiculous as the 2008 GOP effort. Mitt Romney, who would easily have won the Phil Gramm award for financial futility had not Rudy Giuliani spent $50 million to earn a single delegate, is now considering reentering the race in the wake of damaging revelations about John McCain's sluttish relationships with lobbyists and his efforts to game the public election financing system. Fred Thompson, widely viewed on the right as a man of unquestionably presidential timber, left the race amid the impression that he never actually entered it. Ron Paul, the lone anti-Iraq occupation candidate on the GOP side, couldn't even grab a majority of anti-occupation Republicans. California Congressman Duncan Hunter sank without a ripple. Of all the failed Republican candidates, Coloradan Tom Tancredo was probably the most successful: he didn't get any delegates, but he did manage to instill a Pavlovian foaming of the mouth in the other candidates whenever the subject of undocumented immigrants came up.

A recent Barack Obama campaign email carried the tag line "We are the change we've been waiting for", drawn from a speech he made after the February 5th primary extravaganza. The line leaves me cold because my resistance to Obama arises in large part from his inflationary rhetoric, but it nagged at me for several days for reasons beyond that. I finally realized that it reminded me of Walt Kelly's famous "We have met the enemy and he is us" line from a Pogo strip on pollution; it's sort of the flip side.

Serge Kovaleski's New York Times story on Barack Obama's youthful flirtation with recreational drugs has been in the works for a while. Obama wrote about his drug use in his autobiographical "Dreams of My Father", and his mention of the subject prompted a brief flurry of stupidity in December culminating in the resignation of a top Clinton campaign official. Rumors began circulating around then that the Times was planning a major story on the issue. So, what did the paper find?

Not much. "In more than three dozen interviews, friends, classmates and mentors from his high school and Occidental [College] recalled Mr. Obama as being grounded, motivated and poised, someone who did not appear to be grappling with any drug problems and seemed to dabble only with marijuana."

Well, that's no fun. 1740 words and no, er, smoking gun?

Continuing on my quest to close enough browser tabs for my computer to regain some self-respect and nimbleness, here's the second installment of stuff I either meant to write but never quite did, or did write but for some reason couldn't bring myself to part with the web page I used for material. See here for Part 1.

Some of these pages have been open for close to a year, but the one for policy shop Third Way is only a week or so old. Third Way, which describes itself as "a non-profit, non-partisan strategy center for progressives", got a bunch of attention from Blogolia lately when it emerged that they're the bozos responsible for Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller's enthusiastic endorsement of immunizing the telecommunications industry from consequences for violating the law on behalf of the Bush administration's surveillance state.

Many months ago when I was writing something about health care I ran across a blog that had a number of entries on the subject, one of which I used in my piece. That web page and 70-some others are still open in my browser, which in retaliation is now consuming most of my computer's memory and a good chunk of the processor capacity. So I'm going to write some things I meant to write during these past many months and reclaim some space.

The blog in question is Hipparchia's, and she (I think) has added several entries on Canada's health care system since I last checked in. They're all instructive but the one I like the best deals with the origin of the Canadian system, which can be described in two words: Tommy Douglas. Douglas was the Saskatchewan premier who, beginning in the 1950's, fought to bring, single-payer health care coverage to his province. He stepped down in 1961 but the next year, after an epic, decade-long war with private insurers and doctors, his legislation passed and became the model for Canada's national system. Some advocates for a progressive health care system here tend to be federal-centric, and it's good to remember that state and regional efforts can drive the federal one.

When onlookers asked Ben Franklin what sort of government the constitutional convention had produced, he told them "A republic, if you can keep it." Well, we haven't. We no longer live in a constitutional republic. The republic is dead, deceased, demised, passed on, no more, ceased to be, expired, late, bereft of life; it is an ex-republic. You still get to vote, your elected representatives still get to legislate, at least whenever Senate majority leader Harry Reid gets permission from minority leader Mitch McConnell to pass something other than gas, but the fundamental balance that defines a republic is gone.

When last we noted the Bush administration's appalling record on national security, a few items fell through the cracks. The story was on the economic resurgence of opium in Afghanistan following the US invasion that drove the Taliban out of power and ended the group's short-lived but astonishingly effective ban on opium poppy cultivation. Since then, the opium yield has grown in size—record crops every year but one, culimating in an 8,200 ton haul in 2007, as opposed to a few hundred tons in 2001 and a pre-invasion record of 4,200 tons in 1999—and impact, comprising half the country's national income in 2007.

Although Afghanistan is a rich topic for discussion of itself, any comment on it is necessarily incomplete without addressing Pakistan, whose semi-autonomous border regions are home to both the Taliban in exile from Afghanistan and Pakistan's own version of the group, and which is also heavily impacted by the growth in opium production and smuggling.

As the situation in Afghanistan deteriorates, US defense secretary Bob Gates has become increasingly strident toward both Pakistan and his NATO allies in Afghanistan. With his poorly received offers to provide US combat or training troops to Pakistan if only they would ask, he has repeatedly signalled the US desire to take a more active role inside that country. Gates's impatience with NATO countries, especially Germany, has led to some distinctly undiplomatic incidents.

Nearly a decade of investigations, a lurid final report and a concerted campaign for impeachment left Bill Clinton among the more popular American presidents, with the majority of Americans unconvinced of any need to impeach or remove him from office. Nearly a decade of no investigations, with no coherent summary of misdeeds and no institutional effort to impeach, has left George Bush among the most unpopular of all presidents with a large minority, possibly a plurality, of Americans believing he deserves impeachment.

John Edwards made a fine speech in New Orleans yesterday announcing the end of his presidential campaign. He said that he would continue working toward his goal of ending poverty in the United States, and that both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton personally promised him they would make that goal an integral part of their own campaigns and their prospective presidencies.

Welcome to 1964.

Sometimes I resent not owning a television, but at least once a year for the past eight years I've been grateful for the lack.

I read the various State of the Union speech press releases from the White House yesterday, including the morning press gaggle with Dana Perino during which she noted repeatedly that last night's speech wouldn't be chock-a-block with new ideas. For some reason she and Bush advisor Ed Gillespie, who rated his own, separate briefing, were really pumped up about the president's decision to do something about Congressional earmarks, although not, apparently, what he had originally planned to do. There was a lot of talk about a "sprint to the finish," by which I think the aides meant that the president is energized and so on—completely unaffected by the fact that he'll be leaving in his wake a recession, some degree of financial sector meltdown consequent to a wholesale regulatory failure, an enormous amount of new debt and not one but two seriously fucked up military occupations, with all that they entail—but which also fits with the idea of not loading him up with a lot of weighty, concrete goals that could bog him down on the final lap.

Nancy Pelosi is at it again. On Friday, she reiterated her opposition to impeaching George Bush and Dick Cheney, saying that impeachment "would be very divisive in our country" and that despite increasing heat from constituents and fellow lawmakers, impeachment remains off the table.

Yeah, it would be divisive: on one side you'd have people who think the Constitution matters and on the other, those who don't. What a tragedy that would be.

Ronald Reagan killed people, and he killed ideals. He began his campaign for the presidency with a paean to states' rights in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where that cause—the right to trample the rights of others—had claimed the lives of three civil rights activists barely more than fifteen years earlier. In Central America, he painted nun-raping, dope dealing thugs with the high gloss of Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson as they slaughtered tens of thousands of people, in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala, who only wanted to live their lives in peace.

Reagan supported the racist apartheid regime in South Africa; he killed Congressional sanctions against Iraq sparked by Saddam Hussein's use of poison gas against the Kurds; he mounted an assault on regulatory structures that resulted in, among other disasters, a trillion-dollar implosion of the savings and loan industry. When the AIDS epidemic took root and spread in this country, he stood by and did nothing while victims, advocates and scientists begged for research money and government assistance.

He did all that, and more, and he called it, with an easy smile, "Morning in America." Barack Obama thinks Reagan appealed to an overwhelming urge among Americans toward clarity and optimism and "a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing."

A Rutgers law professor is calling on Congress to legislate "a form of preventive detention adapted to terrorism, and outside the criminal justice system" for terrorism suspects in order to spare US courts the frustration of attempting to try them. John Farmer says in a New York Times op-ed piece that trials such as those of Jose Padilla and Hemant Lakhani threaten the fair administration of the law for the rest of us and border on the prosecution of thought crimes. Prosecuting thought crimes is bad, he says, so instead we should just lock thought criminals up indefinitely and not prosecute them.

Problem solved; after all, the government would never abuse the legislated power to grab someone and lock them away forever with no charges.

Memo to Rutgers law students: don't take tips on logic from this guy.

Memo to John Farmer: Gitmo clues.

This year probably won't be any worse for George W. Bush than last year or the year before, but it's likely to be a wild ride for the rest of us. The president faces the prospect of leaving office, assuming we're fortunate enough to actually get shed of him, in the throes of a recession inspired by a combination of laissez-faire lending and corporate socialism and without having accomplished anything other than leaving the world a much messier place than he found it, with the dead bearing witness because the living avert their faces.

The United States is nearly $10 trillion dollars in debt, and racking up more every second. That's thanks in large part to Bush's tax giveaways and the extra trillion dollars in defense spending racked up by the Iraq invasion and occupation. Big financial interests are cutting tens of thousands of jobs even as they reward feckless leadership with hundreds of millions in severance pay and retirement benefits. (But don't mention that on the campaign stump, lest you go the way of John Edwards and get formally shunned by the press, risking the campaign cash and muscle people such as Hilary Clinton enjoy from people such as Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack, the former Bush Ranger who now backs her).

Thanks to Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and other graduates of the Miss Manners school of political confrontation, we have absolutely no chance of ridding ourselves of Bush and Cheney by means of impeachment. The executive pair have created a generation of orphans and refugees in Iraq, they've wrecked our ground-bound military, they've institutionalized torture as an official tool of US foreign policy, they've gutted the Constitution while inaugurating an illegal surveillance state, they've transformed Afghanistan into a narco-trafficking state on steroids, they've set back the fragile cause of peace in Palestaine by a decade or more, and they've transformed our image abroad from one of a generally well-meaning if sometimes inexcusably clumsy giant to that of a frankly malevolent fiend. And that's just a partial list, and the worst is undoubtedly yet to come.

This hasn't been a good week for unity. First the Boren/Nunn Unityfest in Oklahoma disbanded with most of the participants refusing to endorse the concept of a third-party "unity government" presidential bid, and now Unity '08, the much-mocked third-party post-partisan movement, is cutting off its head and sending it to a reputable cryogenics facility.

All is not lost, though: Unity '08's last gasp includes some genuine A-list material. In an email sent to members and now posted on the front page of the group's web site, the organizers came up with this: "The past year has taught us that it's tough to rally millions to a process as opposed to a candidate or an issue."

Former Democratic senators David Boren of Oklahoma and Sam Nunn of Georgia have a message for Democratic presidential candidates: pay up or else.

Boren and Nunn say that unless the Democrats declare a "unity government" and agree to appoint Republicans as senior cabinet members, they'll mount a third-party spolier campaign to prevent a Democratic victory. And they'll do it in the name of civility.

"Say, that's a real nice-looking house you got there. Shame if something happened to it. And I mean that in the nicest possible way."

The weapon of choice for these late-blooming gangsters is Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire New York mayor. Bloomberg is an ideal spoiler candidate—centrist, non-threatening and best of all, self-financing. He might be able to siphon off enough Democratic and independent votes to throw the election to whichever monstrosity Republicans nominate without forcing his above-the-fray backers into the demeaning grind of icky retail politics.

The reaction to my criticism of the response to Barack Obama's Iowa victory speech—I said that the speech was rhetorically fluffy and the response was overheated—was fairly intense. The most pointed comments (more here than at my site) were from people who see Obama as a hollow man.

Well, he's not. He has coherent policies and he's as capable of defending and advancing them as any of the candidates. What bothers me, and what I meant to highlight, is the disconnect I see between what those policies offer, which isn't substantially different from what any of the feasible Democratic nominees offer, and his rhetoric of change and hope. If those policies included genuinely universal health care coverage, or aimed toward a living wage, or otherwise promised some departure from the middle of the road on economic and foreign policy issues, I'd probably be jumping up and down too.

As it is, I can envision a grand new social and political coalition riding triumphantly into Washington and eventually leaving with nothing much to show for the victory beyond the victory. That would be tragic, mostly because I think it would mean that conditions for the poor, the working class and the middle class would have to get much worse than they are now for progressives to get another bite at the apple (making the cheery and possibly unwarranted assumption that they have one now but for the lack of nerve among the top contenders).

Barack Obama's speech following his Iowa caucus victory has been described as inspirational. The reaction seems much more a measure of how desperate many people are for inspiration than of any inherent value in Obama's oratory, which seemed to me to be a largely substance-free exercise in exceptionalism.

Obama used the word "change" six times, and "hope", 11. He described his victory as singular, something upon which people would look back years from now and remember as "the moment when it all began", "the moment ... when we rallied people of all parties and ages to a common cause", "the moment when we finally beat back the policies of fear and doubts and cynicism". He said his supporters "came together as Democrats, Republicans and independents*, to stand up and say that we are one nation. We are one people. And our time for change has come."

But hope is not a plan; it's a thing with feathers. And change is guaranteed, assuming there's an election.

Newly confirmed attorney general Michael Mukasey has announced a Justice Department probe into the destruction of CIA interrogation videos showing the torture of terrorism suspects. The reaction from some people who would like to see someone—anyone—in the Bush administration pay for something—anything—the administration has done is one of cautious optimism, with emphasis on the nature of the federal prosecutor heading the investigation, John Durham, who has apparently never lost a case and has experience dealing with federal agencies.

That optimism, however cautious, is misplaced.

What Mukasey announced is a preliminary inquiry with a very narrow focus: was the destruction of the videos a crime? The announcement provides no context, but it necessarily excludes some possibilities. The destruction took place long after the 9/11 commission closed up shop, so there can't be any connection with having failed to provide them to the commission. Mukasey famously refused an opinion during his confirmation on whether waterboarding is torture, so it's unlikely he's investigating whether or not the CIA destroyed evidence of torture.

We now have two momentarily separate movements, such as they are—Unity '08 and an as yet unnamed collection of disgruntled old blackmailers—aimed at erasing the partisan divide in America.

That would be the divide with the modern-day barbarian GOP and its 30%+ support on one side, and the Democratic party with its nearly 60% on the other.

In between are moderate Republicans, who no longer have a party but are convinced that everyone either is or should be or wants to be just like them.