Joe Lieberman’s Senate Homeland Security committee passed this week a “cybersecurity” bill that would expand the President’s powers and control of the Internet in a national emergency. In addition to Lieberman, the bill’s sponsors include Senators Tom Carper (D-DE) and Susan Collins (R-ME). But it was Collins’ defense of the bill that should send shivers up the spines of anyone who cares about the Internet.

Long before she wrote Share This!: How You Will Change the World with Social Networking, Deanna Zandt was my social networking guru. Of course, I had the benefit of being her friend, so I was privy to her frequent and useful insights on the value of joining Twitter, Foursquare and Facebook, and the most effective ways to use these technologies to promote my ideas and my activism. It was Deanna who convinced me that it benefits your activism to humanize yourself on social networks, and even that you can really spread information far and wide 140 characters at a time. So I have to start off by saying: you rule, Deanna! Your guidance has been invaluable to me.

Robert Byrd, at 92 the oldest member of the US Senate, the longest-serving member in Congressional history and the President pro tem, sits in a Washington-area hospital today.

Jake Tapper’s interview with Leon Panetta has made a lot of news already and he deserves credit for getting the CIA Director on film in the first place. But one question he asked did more harm than good. Tapper asked Panetta to assure us that the US use of drones was legal. But he limited that question to Pakistan.

Just what the right needs. Another low-information voter to rally around.

Corporations are creatures of stature, not, despite the best efforts of the Supreme Court in cases like Citizens United, human beings. Corporations don’t have consciences, or any other human attributes. We hope that the people running corporations have human attributes, like consciences, but it appears that is not always the case. The only goal of a corporation is to make money while limiting liability for the owners. This fixation frequently leads to massive disasters, like the destruction of the Gulf of Mexico.

A fisherman’s wife sees behind the scene’s PR tricks of BP. CNN could have revealed these same tricks to viewers, but fish don’t discover water. They are oblivious to the standard deception that an “uneducated housewife” reveals. The media need stories like this because they don’t see their job as pressing the corporations. However they will reporting on other people pressing the corporations.

So 1,000 US troops per al Qaeda member, at a cost of $1 million each. That’s $1 billion a year we spend for each al Qaeda member to fight our war in Afghanistan.

It seems clear that the environmental devastation of an entire region should take priority over the continued operation of an industry that is mired in corruption and recklessness. Perhaps it is fair that they lose some profits and some jobs as a result of this disaster.

One of the gems buried in Michael Hastings’ now ubiquitous Rolling Stone article is a senior adviser to General McChrystal thanking his lucky stars for public ignorance of the state of the war: