SF Chronicle columnist Debra Saunders can’t stand the idea the Berkeley City Council might pass a resolution saying Berkeley welcomes the resettlement of cleared Guantanamo prisoners. So, she misrepresents recidivism rates from the government, and lies about the cases of two cleared detainees, one of whom was the only known victim of water torture at Guantanamo.

Tonight’s movie, Bell, Book and Candle, based on the play by John Van Druten addresses aspects of love and power, as well as magic and romance. It’s really a tragedy rather than a comedy, as it reinforces stereotypical roles about men, women and witches.

In BB&C–which was directed by an old family friend Richard Quine, who I thought was soooo cool as I was growing up–Greenwich gallery owner/witch Gillian’s attention is drawn to new neighbor Shep Henderson (Jimmy Stewart) so her aunt, also a witch, does a spell to draw them together. The implication is that it’s lust, as opposed to falling in love–according to the plot, not real life–will cause a witch to loose her powers.

The International Justice Network has released a whistleblower tape showing that Aafia Siddiqui was indeed arrested in Pakistan in 2003 and turned over to the ISI and interrogated by the FBI, her children held in separate prisons, and new details on her interrogation by the FBI at Craig Field Hospital in Bagram.

The proposed budget bill that would strip collective bargaining rights from public employees in Wisconsin, and particularly the suggestion by Governor Scott Walker that he would send out the National Guard to quell protests over the action, has suddenly become a major political football in the state.

Just now, three conservative Republicans in Wisconsin who happen to be public employees gave a conference call where they decried Walker’s effort. Bob Jahn, a highway employee from Green Lake and a “proud conservative,” called the plan an intrusion on individual rights which singles out public employees over other Wisconsin workers and goes against every core conservative principle there is. “I have disagreed with my union in the past,” Jahn said, “but I’ve never been more energized to go out and fight with public employees of this state.”

As I described on the Mike Malloy show on Friday and as Brad Friedman discusses in his post on being targeted by the Chamber of Commerce, the essence of the Chamber of Commerce/Bank of America/HBGary scandal is the use of intelligence techniques developed for use on terrorists deployed for use on citizens exercising their First Amendment rights.

ThinkProgress has a post making it clear that the Chamber of Commerce’s nondenial denials don’t hold up. In this post, I’ll begin to show the close ties between the tactics HBGary’s Aaron Barr proposed to use against Wikileaks and anti-Chamber activists and those already used in counterterrorism.

The usual political wrangling has accompanied the Treasury Department’s white paper on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But this is yet another issue happening in a vacuum, divorced from actual circumstances. If you want to talk about reform of the secondary mortgage market, fine. But it’s almost impossible to do so without recognizing the total breakdown in that market and what that has done to housing as a whole.

I submit a few things for the record. First, you have foreclosure mills filing fraudulent documents to cover for the fact that they lost or otherwise bungled mortgage assignments for millions of loans when they securitized them over the past decade. These are the same private actors who would be responsible for the entire securitization market under a plan that phases out Fannie and Freddie.

The broken securitization market is the original driver in this persistent fraud from foreclosure mills and servicers. And the mechanism used by the private market to facilitate their securitizations, namely MERS, was not legal in any way. Yet they continued to use it in violation of state property law.

Shirley Sherrod is quite a woman, and now she has followed through on her promise and filed a lawsuit against Andrew Breitbart. Ms. Sherrod has come to the dance locked and loaded and with a very compelling story. Andrew Breitbart better strap in, it could be a bumpy ride.

So basically, you have the Treasury Secretary of the United States, three years after a major financial crisis, saying out loud that what’s good for Wall Street is good for America.

In other words, welcome your vampire squid overlords.

It seems to be a key intent of public admissions of our spying is to disclose to whom we were listening — Mubarak’s family (and presumably other top officials) — and why we shifted our normal focus away from counterterrorism targets — because of Egyptian security forces had used violence against protesters.

This morning, notorious gay hater Kathryn Jean Lopez sat down with fellow traveler Maggie Gallagher for a special Valentine’s Day talk on gay marriage — and predictable wackiness ensued.