It may seem like a gift that a notorious health care crook, Rick Scott, is leading the attack on health care reform. But like the old swift boaters, his attacks will work if we don’t take them on loudly and persistently.

don’t let this woman around a hypocrisy charge

Cheney gave an incredibly hedged answer when asked whether Bush knew about and authorized torture. Of course, Bob Schieffer didn’t ask the obvious follow-up to figure out WTF it meant.

The news of the death by possible suicide of former CIA “ghost prisoner”, Ali Mohamed al-Fakheri, also known as Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, has caused only a small murmur in the U.S. press. The Washington Post’s Peter Finn wrote a story on it Monday, noting the key fact that it was the tortured confession of al-Libi in an Egyptian prison, where he had been rendered by the U.S.

If wingnuts want dispel the notion that they’re mindless authoritarians with Daddy issues waiting to goosestep behind the Next Great Hero Leader, they probably should stop writing columns about how ideas don’t matter and they just need to find the Next Great Hero Leader.

Every blogger’s favorite Democratic lobbyist Steve Elmendorf has a problem. In the past year, he’s signed Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and other firms who need Democratic lobbyists to help them grease the wheels with a Democrat sitting in the White House. But Democrats don’t seem to want their money:

Steve Elmendorf, a high-powered Democratic lobbyist who represents Citigroup, a major contributor in the past, said that Democrats are shunning money from

The IG report mostly backs up Soufan. The further away you get from the details, the more it supports his account. But when you drill down, you see some discrepancies — not just about him, but about the broader narrative that the FBI was an outpost of institutional opposition to torture.

If Harry Reid puts Dawn Johnsen in the voting mix, it could single-handedly earn the man a carrot from me. Via Politico: “It appears that we have no alternative but to have votes next Monday,” Reid said in a Senate floor speech Monday. “I’ve tried lots of different ways to get [the nominations] done, but there appears that the only thing I can do is file cloture.”

Poor little Blue Dogs. Nobody wants them to fuck up collaborate on healthcare:45 Centrist Democrats Protest Secrecy of Health Care Talks

Forty-five House Democrats in the party’s moderate-to-conservative wing have protested the secretive process by which party leaders in their chamber are developing legislation to remake the health care system.The lawmakers, members of the fiscally conservative Blue Dog Coalition, said they were “increasingly troubled” by their exclusion from the bill-writing

Since Andy Worthington reported on Sheikh al-Libi’s death over the weekend, a few more details on timing have come out.

Ibn Sheikh al-Libi Died in the Last Two Weeks

The first important point is that al-Libi died sometime after April 27, when a Human Rights Watch researcher ran into him in a Libyan jail.