Elections have consequences, we are always told. If Election Day 2008 doesn’t have more positive consequences for LGBT Americans by Election Day 2010, you can expect more passivity from us, Mr President. You will have earned it. See, elections do have consequences.

Here’s what Copenhagen means for the future of food and agriculture.

With US troops still in Iraq, a surge on the way for Afghanistan (where there are already 189000 US troops and US funded contractors ) and the growing drone war in Pakistan, you’d think we were fighting enough wars, but it seems we’ve just joined one more. On orders from President Barack Obama, the U.S. [...]

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It’s a weird thing, this futurist scenario prepared by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. While it recognizes the real threat of the rising neo-feudalist world, it seems more worried about whether the intelligence community will be able to exert the power it does today than about what it means for people more generally.

The Senate Democrats had a conference call with reporters to extol all the great “improvements” they have made to the bill. They listed three improvements they wanted to talk about.

An op-ed in the Sunday New York Times by former investigators and prosecutors Eliot Spitzer, Frank Parnoy, and William Black calls for AIG to put non-privileged e-mails, accounting documents, and financial models on line to allow for an “open source” investigation. The questions they want to examine include:

As fraud investigators, we would like to examine the trading patterns of A.I.G.’s financial products division, and its communications with Goldman Sachs and other bank counterparties who benefited from the bailout. We would like to understand whether the leaders of A.I.G. understood that they were approaching a financial Armageddon, and whether they alerted their counterparties, regulators and shareholders to the impending calamity.

Blind Ambition is—if you haven’t read it already—a great book for any member of the Firedoglake community to read. The entire complex of events that ended up with the shorthand name “Watergate” is incredibly convoluted; think of the Plame affair, multiply it by twenty, and extend the drama over twenty-six months—or twenty-six years, because really, the story did not end with Richard Nixon’s resignation on August 8, 1974, and it hasn’t even ended yet, as John’s splendid afterward (which offers the most convincing explanation in print of what the Watergate burglars were looking for in DNC headquarters) makes perfectly clear. And Blind Ambition, John Dean’s memoir of his participation in the events, is the best single volume Watergate book, out of the literally hundreds of them, to get a full and three-dimensional understanding of the whole thing from start to finish, from the warped executive psychology that produced it (in one of the books funnier scenes young Dean is tasked with screening the avant-garde omnisexual drag queen extravaganza Tricia’s Wedding to see if a case can be made to clamp the filmmakers in leg irons, or something) to the most gripping mystery story history has ever given us.

Some are calling this health care bill a “good bill.” Tom Harkin is trying to sell this bill as a “starter home” with a “solid foundation.” Those who think this Senate bill is built on a strong foundation are either too invested to acknowledge its complete failings or don’t understand the many key components missing from this bill that are necessary to produce a properly working system.

As Marcy Wheeler has diligently demonstrated here, here, and here, that’s simply not true. Not only will the uninsured not be able to afford the insurance, affording medical treatment with that insurance, as Marcy notes, is a completely different matter.