As noted earlier this week, the length of time it takes Norm Coleman’s legal team to get around to filing their promised appeal will be indicative of whether they’re making a good-faith case or if they’re just in it to drag out the time before Al Franken can be seated in the US Senate. He has ten days to do so, and he’s used up nearly half of those days already.

Joel Berg’s All You Can Eat: How Hungry is America? is something of a primer on hunger and food insecurity in America. It traces the fitful history of nutrition assistance programs in America from the Industrial Revolution, when hunger started to become a serious problem, through the Great Depression, when it could not be ignored (although plenty politicians opposed to “the dole” tried) through the sixties and seventies when federal programs made real strides toward the goal of eliminating hunger completely – through the dark days of the 1980s when ketchup became a vegetable and a smiling grandfatherly president made it okay to hate and punish the less fortunate. There is a chapter devoted to the political minefield of Welfare Reform, which saw an immediate decrease in hunger but then faltered under the Bush administration’s much less than compassionate conservatism and yet another decade of Reaganomics.

The AP reports that George Tenet and Porter Goss have criticized Obama’s release of the torture memos.

Of course they would. Those memos, after all, implicate both of them legally.

Francine Busby was one of the first candidates Blue America ever endorsed. 1,216 members of our community contributed $22,828 to her campaign to succeed Republican bribe taker Randy “Duke” Cunningham in 2006. She took 43% of the vote (to lobbyist Brian Bilbray’s 54%).

Treasury and the Fed think credit default swaps and overnight interest rate swaps are a great way to measure the success of TARP. Elizabeth Warren begs to differ.

Douglas A. Johnson, executive director of the Center for the Victims of Torture, testified at the January 2005 Alberto Gonzales confirmation hearings. Johnson’s testimony was ignored by Bradbury’s May 2005 OLC opinions. Will his words back then on prosecuting torturers go similarly unheeded by AG Holder?

The March 10, 2005 “Techniques” memo makes it clear that the torturers who claim the Bybee memo legalized their water-boarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah are wrong.

That’s because the torturers didn’t do what the memo authorized.

Adam Green noticed a couple of weeks ago that the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s idea of an online fundraising campaign that used Norm Coleman was, to put it mildly, in need of serious improvement. He proposed an alternative: the “Norm’s Democratic Dollar a Day” campaign. The DSCC didn’t take him up on the idea, but Democracy for America did — and here’s the result:

No matter who you are, no matter where you rest your head, no matter what your color or creed…we’re able to sing the same song at the root of it all. We just have to try to do so in harmony.

And when we do? It’s just beautiful.

Had to share this video with everyone this morning.

A new song from Boozoo Bajou and a lively performance from The Love Dogs.