Roger Waters – Mother.

What’s on your mind tonight?

Happy Mothers Day. It’s been a weird year for moms and for parents in general: Madonna’s failed adoption, Bristol Palin flip flops on abstinence in order to shill for a shoe company, Octo-mom–both the real life and the musical, Arkansas banning same sex couples adopting, Florida continuing to ban gay couples from adopting.

We have been talking heavily about torture, renditions and the legal and motivational justifications therefore nonstop for the last couple of weeks. But one of the earliest entries in this sordid tale (witness the December 18, 2001 entry on Marcy’s Torture Timeline) was the capture and torture of Ibn Sheikh al-Libi. Now he is dead.

The DOD tries to spin away the shooting of a 12 year old Iraqi boy – and Huffington Post helps out.

Charlie Evans: Is that a girl?
Captain James T. Kirk: That’s a girl.

That howling you hear is coming from the throats of outraged abstinence-only non-sex-education welfare recipients program managers, who just had their Federal gravy train taken away from them after years of Federally-subsidized uselessness courtesy of George W. Bush. However, as Joe over at Amplify Your Voice warns, this doesn’t mean they won’t stop pushing it — especially to Congress.

Bill Greider has played an important part in progressive politics for as far back as I can remember. He left a career at the Washington Post to become the political editor for Rolling Stone, and his political writing was a feature there for the next 17 years. Earlier this year, his important piece at the Nation — which sounded the alarm about the efforts to cut Social Security benefits

To read the British press is to realize how fundamental the failure the theory of libertarian economic thinking has been. In this theory, the wealthy possess a special insight into the allocation of capital, and governments should abandon their role in allocating effort to a small extremely wealthy elite. It was a theory adopted by Iceland, which was lauded for its open laws and “flat tax.”

The CIA and SSCI disagree about key details on Senate torture briefings. So why isn’t Pat Roberts clarifying the issue?

The failure of cramdown teaches valuable lessons. How can we make our ideas viable in this poisonous atmosphere?