What planet is Lugar on? Currently, Republicans would rather lose Russian nuclear base inspections than ratify this treaty, and they’re using it to gain leverage for pork-barrel spending on nuclear weapons “modernization,” which has basically nothing to do with this treaty. If it wasn’t that, they’d hold it hostage for maintaining Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, or more sanctions on Iran, or giving the “state of Jesus” statehood, or any of a thousand other ideas.

On April 29, 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote a missive to Congress on the importance of curbing corporate monopolies that resonates as much today as it did in the wake of the Great Depression:

…the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself.

Boy, does that ever hit home.

In Getting A Grip 2, Frances Moore Lappe takes that lesson and hits hard at its core: to build a stronger more cohesive society with a firm foundation in democracy for all, not just a privileged few, you have to work at it. We all have to work at it. Preferably together.

Of course, the freedom from Rule of Law that the administration from Hell gave us has exploded into tragedies like the freedom from jobs, the freedom from safety of our food and environment, freedom from living wages, and freedom from health care.

After the explosion that rocked a West Virginia mine, killing 29 workers, Mine Safety and Health Administration inspectors have stepped up their efforts, using the regulatory tools already available to them to expand their enforcement activities.

The Administration has now realized trying a Canadian accused of murder for killing someone in an active battlefield as a teenager exposes the Gitmo show trials as a kangaroo court. But they don’t know whether they have the authority to intervene to stop it.

Ken Mehlman left the gay closet earlier this week, asking for understanding if not support from the glbt community. That would be easier to find if Mehlman demonstrated a bit of understanding of that community and the toll that the Bush White House and RNC took on it while Mehlman was working there. No matter how much he did in his Off-The-Record political closet, it’s going to be hard to overcome what happened on the record.

In a perfect embodiment of the vapidity of Glenn Beck’s tea party movement that is infesting the National Mall today, we see in this morning’s Washington Post that Bruce Springsteen’s iconic war protest song “Born in the USA” is once again being misused and abused. The sentiments embodied in Springsteen’s song are directly in opposition to everything Beck and his movement represent.

Funny how the “respectable” press must continually promote race-baiting dingbats like Glenn Beck and the Koch-backed Astroturf that is the Tea Party wing of the GOP — while comparatively all but ignoring the richer-than-God paleoconservative oil barons funding the whole shebang. To paraphrase Blue Texan, it’s the best “grass roots” protest that a billionaire’s money can buy.

The FDL community is an uncommonly close-knit group of very disparate people from so many different backgrounds and with such diverse and complementary skills and abilities, something like a very complicated Fair Isle pattern, or maybe a fisherman’s sweater with many complicated cables.

From Muppets Studio — The Swedish Chef makes Popcorn Shrimp. Be sure to pay very close attention to the captions.