Exposing gossip and criminality in various and sundry bombings is one thing, but coming after our beloved wealthy people? Now Wikileaks must be stopped!

Willie Nelson and Asleep at the Wheel – Hesitation Blues, Cooder Graw – Llano Estacado

The first TV show I can ever remember watching when I was just a mere lad (this is how old people talk, we were once “lads” or “young striplings” … whatever the hell those are) was The Swamp Fox which was broadcast on Sunday nights.

Until I read Leslie Nielsen’s obituary this evening, I had no idea that he had been the Swamp Fox. That is both awesome and sad.

The driving force behind Al-Qaeda and related groups acts of terrorism is not a profound hatred of air travel. They don’t deeply despise the Boeing 747. They aren’t driven by the belief that the ability to travel from New York to San Francisco in under 7 hours is affront to God.

They hate America and want to perform acts of terrorism to terrorize the country, regardless the venue. Even if we could magically make domestic air travel 100 percent terrorist proof, something that would not be possible without full body CAT scans or colonoscopies to check every body cavities, it would not make us any safer in the aggregate.

Right on the heels of our push to write New York state senators in support of medical marijuana, we have just learned that the Illinois House of Representatives is scheduled to vote TOMORROW on SB. 1381 — a bill to legalize medical marijuana for patients in that state.

Illinois is contemplating a slightly different bill from the one in New York, in that state-licensed ‘Compassion Centers’ would be set up to provide prescribed medical marijuana to card-carrying patients in the state. SB. 1381 is an important bill that would improve the quality of life of seriously ill patients in Illinois, and we want to make sure state representatives know they should support it.

As long as there’s a public defender alert enough to recognize the potential for entrapment, and the import of the missing recording and recording device of the first meeting between Mohamud and the FBI, I think we can presume this defendant is in competent legal hands.

Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life is a cultural icon, full of metaphysics, homilies, the romantic images of small town America, and the struggle of Everyman to do good and be the best possible person. The underlying theme is monetary wealth versus the wealth in happiness.

After the Lisbon Treaty went into effect last year, the EU Parliament balked at giving Americans free run of the SWIFT database. The EU and US put an interim agreement in place. Which the EU Parliament then overturned in February. The US then granted EU citizens privacy protections Americans don’t have. But then the US started negotiating unilateral agreements with countries, using the Visa Waiver as blackmail to force individual countries into submission (and, some in Europe suggested, drumming up a terrorist threat to add to the pressure). One of the cables from yesterday’s WikiLeaks dump offers a window into the US perspective on the negotiation, in a cable from the US Embassy to Germany to the Secretary of State’s Office. The cable speaks disparagingly of the FDP while revealing bankster hypocrisy.

On a conference call just now, White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer and U.S. Chief Performance Officer and the Office of Management and Budget’s Deputy Director for Management Jeffrey Zients defended the White House’s proposed pay freeze for federal employees from the charge that this will drive talented workers out of government as they see no prospects for individual advancement.

We’ll shortly be hearing the objections of deficit hawks to the deficit reduction package Demos, The Century Foundation, and the Economic Policy Institute. No doubt they’ll echo the criticisms that have already been leveled at the deficit-shrinkage roadmap Rep. Jan Schakowsky put on the table earlier this month. To get a sense of what those criticisms are likely to be, I recently had a close look at a Schakowsky critique by The Atlantic’s resident deficit hawk, Derek Thompson.