Yesterday Sheldon Whitehouse used the idea that we could hold the current Guantanamo detainees similar to the way we hold people under a mental health commitment. Here is some information about the rights of those under a mental health commitment and concerns about the analogy being used in this context.

Oh for heaven’s sake. Our financial oligarchs are living in a fantasy world as remote from reality as any Yellow Elephant paintball bunker. Amanda finds this tripe by Peter Robinson in Forbes about business leaders afraid to speak out against the administration (per Atrios):

As far as I can tell–and I Googled on this until my fingertips grew tender–[Clifford] Asness is the only businessperson of any standing to have opposed

Jamie’s book does an excellent job chronicling how the conservative doctrines of the 70s and 80s, monetarism and supply-side economics, were twisted into their opposites by the “conservatives” who actually held power in the last thirty years. The Republicans who rode to power espousing these views, beginning with Reagan, were interested in special tax breaks and sweetheart contracts for their friends, not small government and “free markets.”

It should say something when unemployment has taken off that it has swamped Slate’s interactive unemployment map, rendering it a haze of unreadable red. However, when you look at the metro and county data, some very interesting trends become obvious. The Reaganite revolt against taxes began in California and is most closely associated with it.

Hasn’t Mullen heard? They hate us because we’re free. Just ask Dick Cheney and Mitt Romney.

Elizabeth Warren explains securitization of small business loans and consumer debt. She doesn’t think the Temporary Asset-Backed Securities Loan Fund can do much to help small business or consumers.

It’s character that matters in our political narratives. It’s through character that others judge us, and it’s through character our values are expressed.

Washington Post Ombudsman Andrew Alexander decided to move the apostrophe in his job title this week. He’s not the readers’ representative; he is a reader’s representative. And that reader, “sports media consultant” Ari Fleischer, has a complaint about the Post’s Maureen Dowd wannabe, Dana Milbank, most famously scrutinized by Ombudsman Deb Howell, who made her Ombuds bones excoriating Milbank for wearing hunter blaze orange on Keith Olbermann to comment on Dick Cheney’s hunting accident.

Goodness, gracious me! Glenn Kessler and Howard Schneider just posted a doozy on the WaPo site, which will put the cat among the pigeons! And why am I not surprised to find the fingerprints of our dear old friend and pardoned Iran-Contra criminal, Eliot Abrams, on this one.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen. Colin Powell. Dr. Alvin Poussaint. Tom Ridge. Sen. Barbara Boxer. Sen. Richard Shelby. Sen. Byron Dorgan. Sen. Jon Kyl. Sen. Ben Nelson. Karl Rove. Sen. Dick Durbin. Newt Gingrich. Interior Sec. Ken Salazar. Tom Fitton. Elaine Showalter. FDL Book Salon: Dean Baker hosts James K. Galbaraith.