Netroots Nation 2010 will be in Las Vegas. I remember Las Vegas in 2005, when Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid welcomed us, when the gathering was called YearlyKos and didn’t yet have a number attached. We raved about him, waving signs that said “Give ‘Em Hell, Harry!” We enjoyed the scrappy boxer’s speech about taking back the Senate the next year, after protecting America from the predations of the last years of the Bush Administration.

three distinct categories

This week I had a chance to facilitate a meeting at Rep Jan Schakowsky’s Chicago office for a group of her constituents. Organized by Credo and FDL, the message was clear – a Public Option is essential and anything less is not reform.

Mr. President:

Please accept my apology for interrupting your speech at Netroots Nation. I was raised in the South, as you were, and my mother taught me better. But once in a while, the circumstances of history throw manners out the window.

In parts one and two of this series on the origins of the SERE torture program, we examined how unlikely it was that James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, relying on entrepreneurial guile and chutzpah alone, convinced a passive Pentagon and CIA, eager to find some way to get terror intelligence, to buy into their “learned helplessness” interrogation paradigm.

In 1863, Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Two years later, the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery and prohibited involuntary servitude. But as Douglas Blackmon shows in his powerful book, Slavery by Another Name, unfree labor did not disappear at the end of the Civil War. Instead, it took on a new, pernicious form.

The Stamford Marriott Hotel & Spa in Connecticut, site of a brutal 2006 rape of a woman in her own car and in front of her very young children, has blamed her for the attack and outed her to friends who had no knowledge of the attack.

Keynes saw what happened in the early 20th century what could happen if a small inbred circle of people consistently were allowed to choose short term expediency over long term efficacy. We are going down the same road, and it ends in the same place. This is why it is essential to return to the ideas of Keynes, in a more profound way than has yet happened in the public debate.

Hurray! Now all the Teabaggers will go home and tons of Republicans will get on board with health care reform, right?

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan has $10.5bn in assets. Why does it want staggering rate increases?