John Prine – Aint Hurtin Nobody, and, The Notorious Cherry Bombs – It’s Hard to Kiss the Lips at Night That Chew Your Ass Out All Day

This house was open. This house was everybody’s, belonged to anybody who opened the door that day, anybody who could come and stay. And Governor Walker locked it down. Locked it away. Bolted it shut. They’re rifling through purses now, scanning briefcases. You have to take off your coat to come in. You have to wait in line.

The Texas State Board of Examiners claims they haven’t enough evidence to challenge the legitimacy of CIA torture contractor James Mitchell’s professional license to practice psychology. This is but the latest in a number of legal defeats in the now years-long attempt to bring torturers to justice. The campaign to bring these criminals to justice spans the continent, from Berkeley to Texas, from Ohio to New York, while abroad, efforts to investigate or prosecute U.S. torturers have met varying fates in Poland, Lithuania, Spain, and the United Kingdom. What more can be done to expose the war criminals, and bring them before the law?

The fallout from US-Pakistan tensions over the arrest of CIA contractor Raymond Davis for killing two Pakistanis on January 27 has continued to expand. Dawn.com reported on Friday on the number of US personnel in Pakistan believed to have diplomatic immunity, and on the same day, an American was arrested for overstaying his visa in Pakistan. Taken together, these bits of information suggest that Pakistan is carefully analyzing the data it has on potential US operatives within Pakistan and is carefully documenting their status. On Monday, the Express Tribune reported that it has received word that some suspected US spies in Pakistan have stopped their activities and some have even left the country.

In Troubadours, The Rise of the Singer-Songwriter, our guests, director Morgan Neville and producer Eddie Schmidt, have created a vibrant film full of music, history and anecdotes. The film is an intimate and illuminating, funny, sad and cautionary tale that chronicles one the most important cultural movements of the past sixty years–rise of the singer-songwriter–troubadours–framed by the history of the still-extant club that launched their careers, Doug Weston’s Troubadour.

Founded by Doug Weston in 1957, the Troubadour, a nightclub located in West Hollywood–then itself not a city, but merely an unincorporated part of Los Angeles County–became the nexus of first the folk and then the growing singer-songwriter movement.

He’ll probably just get picked up by TASC, which was about to buy out HB Gary Federal anyway. But I do take some pleasure at his recognition that his reputation is for shit.

If the election between Walker and Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett were held today, Barrett would win 52-45, mainly because Walker is losing Republican union voters

President Obama’s re-election is going to hinge on the top issue with voters, and that is jobs and the economy. Seven hundred thousand jobs can easily be the difference between Obama winning a close election thanks to a steadily recovering economy with official unemployment dropping to 7.9 percent by November 2012, and Obama losing because the economy seems to have effectively stalled with unemployment at 8.4 percent.

What’s going on in Wisconsin right now by the state Republicans is pretty unconscionable, when you add it all up. They’re using some serious strong-arm tactics to break the protesters and the Senate Dems.

For the moment it looks like just three things have worked to create jobs: the MIC, QE2 and other policies favoring commodities, and actual industrial policy.