A little oil spill, some financial reform, and a lot of terror.

Tweety And The Beanstalk starring Tweety and Sylvester. This Warner Bros./Merrie Melodies cartoon was released on May 16, 1957.

Earlier Cynthia was musing about two different flavors of “conservative” stupid: the citizenship-stripping Liebermongery, and solemn pronouncements that Miranda warnings have magic powers. Both are indeed as dumb as they are dogmatic. Citizen-stripping and ending Miranda warnings for arrested terrorists would be utterly pointless as far as coping with terrorism goes, but both are deeply-held [...]

It doesn’t matter what the purpose of Gates’ little review is – which could have begun a year before it actually did. The practical effect of not taking any Congressional action this year – Gates’ stated goal – is to not pass anything related to DADT for the near future.

Both Steven Edwards and Michelle Shepherd (who are both among the journalists banned on Thursday) previously reported that Claus conducted most of Khadr’s interrogations at Bagram. Both raised the question whether Khadr was subjected to the same kind of abuse Claus used on other detainees, most of all Dilawar, who died after abuse in US custody. But in his on-the-record interview with Shepherd, Claus insisted that Khadr wasn’t subject to any of that same kind of abuse.

It’s hard to tell which group of f**king cowards is stupider, citizenship strippers or Miranda deniers. Abraham Lincoln once said something about it being better to remain silent and be suspected of being ignorant than to open your mouth and remove all doubt. Really you guys should just stop publicly displaying both your ignorance and your cowardice. Just go cower under you bed and let the FBI and the US Attorneys continue doing their excellent jobs of catching and convicting the bombers.

Fortune magazine calls the weak employer mandate an “unintended consequence.” That’s nonsense. The logic of this producing a system that encourages companies to drop coverage is clear. If you look at the people who helped President Obama design this law, they all oppose the employer-based system and wanted to eliminate it. The Administration also did not try to get a strong employer mandate. I strongly believe the incentive for a massive dropping of coverage was part of the plan and not a bug.

Coming in third at his state’s Republican Party convention, Utah Republican Senator Bob Bennett has lost his chance at his party’s nomination and is too late to file as an independent candidate. His career as a U.S. Senator is effectively over.

In his new book, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, Bill McKibben portrays the dire environmental conditions that a generation ago seemed like abstract predictions of what our grandchildren might endure. In much of his previous work the environmental journalist and activist aimed to wake people up to the existence of climate change before it was too late.

Last year and in February, we watched as the EU balked at US demands for data-sharing under the SWIFT program. The Belgian cooperative in charge of the international money transfer database moved its servers to the EU, but the US still wanted the same access it had had when the servers were in the US. The US had tried to push through a last-minute deal before EU Parliament changed hands last year, but the Parliament rejected that deal. So now the EU is trying to decide what kind of data-sharing they’ll have with the US.