Some horrible Scottish fossil thinks if you don’t like torture, you’re a traitor and a fag. Well, fuck him and all the stateside wingnuts Scotch-egging (like tea-bagging, but with more lard) his shriveled Caledonian nutsack.

Yesterday PEER reported that President Obama asked a Bushie lawyer who spent years battling for mountain top destruction coal mining to run the Federal agency that regulates mountain top destruction mining. Change you can believe in? Yes – if you believe in hiring one of Steven Griles’ helpers and forever burying ancient streams and hollows under toxic coal mining waste in a mad rush to roast the planet.

As I noted last night, MiniCheney very pointedly avoided claiming that al-Nashiri provided important intelligence as a result of being waterboarded. In a non-sequitur response to Norah O’Donnell’s assertion that waterboarding is torture, MiniCheney offered this as rebuttal:”There were three people who were waterboarded, and two of those people are people who gave us incredibly important and useful information. . . ”

According to reporting by Ryan Grim at The Huffington Post, the President and Congressional negotiators have agreed that student loan reform, specifically to reduce the subsidies to student lenders (of which Senator Ben “Bad” Nelson of Nebraska has always been particularly protective) will not require 60 votes in the Senate.

Greetings, FDL book salon members, and welcome to Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland. It’s a bleak place, an America broken into pieces, cracked apart by disagreement over war and the method of prosecuting war; over race and racism; over whether you can dissent from official opinion and still count truly as an American citizen. It’s not at all like the country we live in, thank goodness. Rick’s written a powerful narrative here about how those cracks appeared in the American landscape, and about who started and widened them, and to what purpose. It’s a great read, rich in vivid, often chilling illustrations of the era.

If the torture program began–as Michael Hayden has said–as a covert op, then it would require Bush to have notified Congress of the plan to torture before it happened. That did not happen. In fact, even according to reports from the CIA, it appears the CIA did not have its presidential finding until a year after the torture started.

Far more than most of the candidates the netroots has gotten behind, Darcy Burner, who ran in 2006 and 2008 against Dave Reichert in WA-08 west of Seattle, became integrated into the online community. A few days ago I covered the entry on the 2010 candidate into that race, Suzan DelBene, an old colleague of Darcy’s from Microsoft.

Porter Goss, Nancy Pelosi and Jane Harman are fighting about who knew what when. But the best way to put an end to this partisan bickering is to have an investigation. If Democrats are exposed for having been complicit, so be it, I’ve got no problem with that.

I can’t offer you a tote bag or a coffee mug, but I can offer this: if FDL can get the funds to support a full-time Emptywheel, a lot of folks will sleep a lot less soundly at night — Addington, Bybee, Cheney, lazy congresspeople, TradMed stenographers, . . .

In case you were wondering whether the GOP/Media Complex still was protecting their old buddy George W. Bush and his friends, David Gregory answers that question for you: Yes.