I still don’t think the Senate/White House bill is going anywhere, either with or without a public option, for reasons I’ve outlined before — though some seem to be hell-bent on forcing House Democrats to throw themselves on its funeral pyre. But the idea that they’d even try to pass it using reconciliation without a [...]

New Hampshire Senator Judd Gregg, who must now be referred to by Village media elites in every instance as “Barack Obama’s first choice for Commerce Secretary,” took time on the floor of the United States Senate in 2005 to school Democrats on how and why reconciliation was entirely appropriate.

Embattled New York Governor (I don’t know, “embattled” seems like the wrong word here, but I’ll press on. . . ) David Paterson will not run for election this fall, the New York Daily News is reporting. Paterson, long suffering from low approval ratings, an uncooperative State legislature, and a fiscal crisis, has been dogged this month by stories of questionable conduct by a close aide, David Johnson—and earlier this week, that story escalated to include the Governor, himself.

The governor has long been thought vulnerable to a primary challenge from State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, though Cuomo has not officially entered the race. Whispers around New York suspect that Cuomo or his close associates have something to do with driving the story of Paterson’s aide to the surface.

For those who have always wanted to “make ‘em filibuster,” you actually saw a variant of it last night, if you were paying attention. Jim Bunning, the slightly kooky retiring Senator from Kentucky, refused unanimous consent to move to a bill extending unemployment benefits and the COBRA subsidy for 30 days, basically ensuring that millions of people will see their benefits run out on Sunday, barring some miracle today. Democrats went until midnight on the floor of the Senate trying to get past Bunning, but he stuck it out for a few hours, refusing to consent. And he had the gall to complain that he missed the Kentucky-South Carolina basketball game, while denying help to the jobless and the suffering.

In my last post, I showed that the CIA asked DOJ to approve the use of mock burial, but DOJ refused. I noted that the ICRC report doesn’t appear to show that Abu Zubaydah was subjected to mock burial (though he was subject to confinement in both a small and a larger box).

But what if he was? What if, in the period before the torture memos, James Mitchell subjected Abu Zubaydah to mock burial, and DOJ later refused to give it retroactive approval?

Well played, sir.

There is one less place (barely) to read one of the villages many idiots.

AC/DC — Its A Long Way To The Top (If You Wanna Rock N Roll).

Some of Harold Ford and Lauren Ashley’s best friends are gay!

I spent the day at the New School listening to Glenn Greenwald and Daniel Ellsberg speak on “The Recurrence on Limits of Knowledge.” Joining them was Chris Capozzola of MIT and David Barstow of the NYT, subbing for Eric Lichtblau.

As amusing as it would’ve been to see Glennzilla scrap with Litchtblau, I loved hearing Barstow speak. He broke the Pentagon Generals story, one of the best pieces of investigative journalism in recent memory, and advocated for government contractors being subject to FOIA requests.

I have to say, I like that suggestion a lot.