Featuring new videos from Ray Wilie Hubbard and Scott Miller.

Former Bush administration officials and hangers-on try to dig the memory hole deeper.

Remembering Martin Luther King Jr. today.

I saw a few comments that today’s Taliban assault on Kabul had people asking, “What’s Pashto for Tet?”

We’re thrilled to have the YERT crew back to talk about their yearlong travel project Your Environmental Road Trip and a few more of the amazing people and places they’ve encountered along the way.

Ultimately, as a number of people pointed out after watching this testimony, this may end up being another Scopes Trial. It may be that the forces of prejudice will, once again, win out over science. But in a head to head confrontation of two lawyers, it sure looks like science is winning the debate this time.

Should those 65 members who received $430,000 in donations because they pledged to vote against any bill that did not have a public option keep the money if they break that pledge, or should they give it back?

In 1911 the German democratic socialist Robert Michels faced a similar problem, and it was the impetus for his classic book Political Parties [...] Michels recognized the challenge his work presented to his comrades on the left and viewed the task of democratic socialists as a kind of noble, endless, Sisyphean endeavor, which he described by invoking a German fable. In it, a dying peasant tells his sons that he has buried a treasure in their fields. “After the old man’s death the sons dig everywhere in order to discover the treasure. They do not find it. But their indefatigable labor improves the soil and secures for them a comparative well-being.”

A major new piece from Scott Horton at Harper’s about the alleged suicide of three detainees at Guantanamo Bay in September 2006. After obtaining a long-secret investigation from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, Horton notices the official explanation for the deaths is absurd.

The big question is: can they force the Senate bill through the House? Such a move would face some very angry progressives, representatives in labor heavy states who don’t want the excise tax, and a small group of conservative Democrats in the House who might bolt at the bill’s lack of Stupak’s anti-choice amendment. Getting the House to swallow the Senate bill whole would be an extreme uphill battle.