Pull up a chair…set your inner migrant free, and share…and perhaps one small group can get people thinking about the common dream we share, instead of the borders and biases which divide us. Margaret Mead said it could be so….

Featuring new videos by Gutbucket Slim and The Golden Filter.

It was only six and a half years ago that Allen became a well-known journalist the old-fashioned way — co-writing a story for the Washington Post that was immediately hailed as “one of the most memorable pieces of White House journalism produced in the Bush era” and was substantially responsible for the conviction of a high-ranking government official on perjury and obstruction of justice charges.

Some of Bill Heck’s best friends are women. He’s even married to one – and allows her to work!

Lincoln comes into the debate having passed surprisingly strong derivatives legislation out of the Senate Agriculture Committee, really her first major legislation while she’s held the chairwoman’s gavel. But that legislation has been undermined by Chris Dodd either weakening it to merge with his Wall Street reform bill or forcing Lincoln to submit it as an amendment. Halter may take the position that Lincoln doesn’t have the juice to even get bills out of her committee onto the floor of the Senate, or that Lincoln stood idly by while risky derivatives destroyed the economy, forcing a taxpayer bailout she supported, and that fixing it later doesn’t exactly wash away the initial negligence.

Here’s where we’re at on the Wall Street reform, with a vote on a motion to proceed expected Monday: we have positives on some fronts, negatives on others, and the Republicans still acting like spoiled children. Business as usual.

Bob Baer has a column out stating that he can’t figure out why the torture tapes were destroyed–and repeating CIA spin claiming the torture depicted in the tapes should not, itself, be a legal problem, since it was approved by DOJ. I thought I ought to sum up what we who have been following all along already know–but Baer’s CIA sources aren’t telling him.

Senate Republicans say they’re against both the bailouts and the Democrats’ proposed legislation to end them. They say that Sen. Dodd’s bill would “actually guarantees future bailouts.” It’s time for the Republicans to put up or shut up. Will they make Dodd’s bill better by breaking up the too big to fail banks and putting new rules in place that never let them get so big and systemically risky, or will they shill for Wall Street?

The law, which takes effect in 90 days, will make it a crime to be in the US without proper documentation. Anyone in Arizona can be asked by authorities to produce proof of their immigration status or citizenship—their “papers,” as it were—if they are suspected of being in the US illegally. What justifies that suspicion is, by most accounts, absurdly broad.

The Administration sent the Larry Summers to PBS News Hour to explain to the unsophisticated that if we broke up the megabanks and instead had many smaller banks, it would be the end of America and the financial industry as we know it. I thought that was the point.