Revealing that her understanding of public health alerts has not evolved from the Bush-era panics over color-coded terror alerts and anthrax attacks, the head of Concerned Women of America, Wendy Wright, says “some people” blame the Obama Administration for the political timing of the swine flu alert, since it happened one day before tomorrow’s cloture vote on the nomination of Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius to head HHS, a critical department.

GM may or may not have killed the electric car (I’m test driving the Volt tomorrow). But it just killed Pontiac.

The Stress Test Is Not a test of whether or not, if a given bank holding company were liquidated right now, it would be worth more than 0 dollars. As such, it is not, primarily about mark-to-market accounting. The question is now “are the banks solvent”, the question is “can they keep operating and if not how much money do they need to keep operating?” In household terms, think of it as “can they pay their bills”, not “what is their net worth?”

There is no better illustration of the collapse of American principles of government accountability than today’s column by David Broder.

Email from Brendan Skwire — how to make sue collins office flip out:

At the same time as the Bush Administration was devising a plan to torture Abu Zubaydah, the the DIA was raising doubts about the intelligence collected by torturing Ibn Sheikh al-Libi.

I’m pretty sure Kit Bond doesn’t see the irony of using the Nazis’ Dolchstoßlegende in a national policy debate about torture.

WALLACE: Senator Levin, let me get Senator Bond into this.

Let’s talk about this issue of accountability, the possibility of prosecutions of top administration officials.

“Does it belong in this bill? Should we have $870 million in this bill? No, we should not.”

On Wednesday night, I’ll be at the campus of Virginia Tech co-hosting the Democratic Virginia governor’s debate between Creigh Deeds, Terry McAuliffe and Brian Moran. My co-hosts will be Nico Pitney of the Huffington Post, David Grant of the Collegiate Times and Virginia blogger Ben Tribbett of Not Larry Sabato.

The debate starts at 7:30 PM ET and it will be livestreamed here and at the HuffPo, but anybody who wants

The request to JPRA for a description of waterboarding appears to have come from DOD General Counsel Jim Haynes directly. And he did it already knowing they needed backup to authorize waterboarding.