The Rolling Stones featuring Buddy Guy — Champagne and Reefer.

Greater Wingnuttia is all screechy and shouty, which is not quite news, but it’s more than a little entertaining that the current reason they’re all screechy and shouty (aside from the fact that it’s Wednesday) is that Newt frickin’ Gingrich has been ruled insufficiently hardcore wingnut loony.

How nice that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, a Republican Congressman from Alabama, and 206 of his House GOP colleagues live in a country where political opponents are not disappeared, tortured, or murdered in the dead of night, their children stolen to be brought up by the very intelligence officers that disappeared them.

So maybe Rogers didn’t appreciate the criminal absurdity of his comments to the Washington Post on Friday May 13, after a House vote defeated a proposed amendment by Democratic Rep. Maurice Hinchey (NY) on the declassification of U.S. intelligence files regarding the 1976 Argentine generals coup and the bloody seven year dictatorship that followed. According to the Post, Rogers “said declassifying them would distract U.S. spies from the fight against al-Qaida.”

Does it help to explain DOJ’s failure to crack down on mortgage fraud that one of the agents assigned to investigate it was instead sleeping with–and helping defend–one of those being investigated for fraud?

When facing endless “war,” be it a war on drugs or a war on terror, such niceties as constitutional rights always end up a causality of these nebulous conflicts. After all, when eternally battling with a generalized evil that will never cease to exist, the trampling of a few personal freedoms can be framed as an acceptable price. The latest example of this trend can be seen with this horrible new Supreme Court ruling, which basically shreds our Fourth Amendment rights.

Long, long ago and far, far away there were Ethics Committees in both houses of our legislative branch, empowered to keep members from violating basic canons of decency and disgracing the body called Congress.

In case that sentence sounds altogether outdated and quaint, it does seem that when the Ethics Committee in the House of Representatives was dismembered (pun intended), it turned loose standards by which the so-called representatives of the country were able to dishonor their offices and the country. The Ethics Committee did its work, and caused the end of the career of Tom DeLay after his misadventures with Jack Abramoff’s lobbying payoffs. That was its own end, as well.

We’ve been writing a bit about Mohamed Osman Mohamud, the young Oregon man charged on WMD charges for allegedly trying to detonate an inert bomb the FBI helped him get. His attorneys are preparing an aggressive entrapment defense (those defenses almost never work, but there are some interesting factors in his case), arguing that Mohamud refused early entreaties to engage in violence yet the FBI kept pressing him to do so.

Democrats were willing to cut $400 billion from Medicare, Coburn wanted another $130 billion lopped off. Not a pretty picture.

The top cybersecurity guy at DHS, Phil Reitinger, announced his resignation today. Which is pretty odd, given that Obama just rolled out his cybersecurity strategy a few days ago.

President Obama plans to give a speech tomorrow on the Arab uprising, where he seeks to deliver a coherent response to the protests throughout the Middle East and North Africa. If you’ve been paying attention, you know that’s not really possible.