In the midst of the ongoing orgy of adulation for Seal Team Six killing Osama Bin Laden and the former Vice President appearing on television to advocate a return to waterboarding as official US torture policy, there has been little attention to the fact that Pakistan took several wives and children of Bin Laden into custody after the US raid of the compound. The US now seeks access to these family members. Did the US intend to torture these children with insects as they did Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s children, if the helicopter on which they would have flown had not been destroyed?

Today Bahrain began a “trial” for 21 opposition leaders, seven of them to be tried in absentia. The trial was suddenly announced on Saturday following public attention on Friday – including an urgent appeal by Amnesty International – when word spread that human rights leader Abdulhadi Alkhawaja had been taken from jail to a hospital for surgery for injuries caused by torture. (Alkhawaja is known to many FDL readers as the father of @angryarabiya)

• Assad strikes back.
• Tragedy and disaster on the Mississippi.
• The POTUS on the OBL raid.
• Or, alternatively, they could just raise taxes.
• Dick Cheney, unrepentant war criminal.

Time to credit Robert Taft and Calvin Coolidge for winning the 20th century…and beyond.

Percy Sledge – When A Man Loves A Woman

My question for tonight is: who would you cast off the airplane? Whom would you return to the jetway? Who doesn’t fly with Pilot You?

In an attempt to get a handle on what exactly the good common sense salt-of-the-earth Real Americans of flyover country think about the America-hating homosexual communists in the Mainstream Media, CBS sat down with anger bear Andrew Breitbart who operates a ramshackle race baiting shack in rustic, yet quaint, Brentwood.

As we get more clarity on the menu of options in the upcoming budget debate, we’re seeing a narrowing of differences between the two parties. The Republicans may not want to admit it, but they’ve given up on changing the structure of Medicare. You can be sure of this by looking at the proposal of the Republican Study Committee, the far-right rump in the House (and it’s much more than a rump, including 3/4 of the entire House GOP caucus), which created a list of demands for increasing the debt limit. Even THEIR plan doesn’t mess with Medicare.

Apocalypse Never is a frightening book to read but impossible to put down. In clear, accessible prose, Tad Daley unblinkingly lays out the case, point by point, for why we must ultimately rid the world of nuclear weapons or else suffer the inevitable consequences of the end of civilization as we know it. Daley then takes on the task of showing how this seemingly Herculean task can be accomplished, even within our lifetimes. It is compelling and accurate in its assessments and one of the absolute best out there on why we simply cannot continue along the way it has been.

OK. I guess technically the title is not true. If folks hadn’t been laid off and collected Unemployment Compensation, the funds would just be sitting in the various state coffers, unused. But the unemployed are not the reason the economy tanked; the unemployed are not the ones sending jobs overseas; the unemployed are not the ultimate root cause of the problem.