Across the country, politicians have been selling off public assets to private businesses in exchange for hefty campaign contributions and sweetheart deals. The politicians claim they are saving tax dollars, but when the real costs are examined, it’s only the corporations – who back them financially at election time – who are making a financial killing on the deals. This kind of corrupt pay-back to wealthy corporate-CEOs has produced numerous disasters for taxpayers, who end up paying more in the long run.

I know, I know — IOKIYAR.

Both sides played one of their cards in the battle over the debt limit and a deal on the nation’s budget deficit today. First, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told National Journal that there will be no tax increases in any deal that results in an increase in the debt limit. He also spelled out what the deal would look like in his perfect world, and even managed to offer some political advice to the President.

The Wisconsin Supreme court sticks it to the poor and middle class while statistics show it is more than a trend, it’s a feature of the new gilded age.

Los Lonely Boys — Senorita.

These past five decades have been really exciting, thrilling, overwhelming, full of noise and laughter and music, world tragedies and huge advances, personal sorrows and joys. Close friends have died, married, divorced, remarried, had babies, been denied the right to marry, lost their homes. I have loved well, but at times not wisely.

Yesterday was a low point in the federal justice system: it was offensive and heinous that a petitioner could come in to federal court to argue that a judge’s sexual orientation, and relationship status, deprives that judge of the ability to rule impartially. Happily, Judge Ware did not take long to discard this odious argument, made by bigots as a last gasp against the arc of justice.

The Center for Constitutional Rights has filed an appeal for the families of two of the three men who died in mysterious circumstances in June 2006. The U.S. government called it “asymmetrical warfare” by the detainees, who are said to have killed themselves in some belief that would hurt the U.S. government. As bizarre as that theory is, Defense Department investigations found the men committed suicide in a multiple, timed series of three planned suicides.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court, just hours before a deadline imposed by state legislative Republicans, just reinstated the anti-union law which a district court judge had blocked because it violated state open meetings requirements. They made the novel interpretation that those requirements don’t apply to the legislature.

Jon Tester is, to the best of my knowledge, the first member of Congress to complain about FBI’s new investigative guidelines allowing agents to–among other thing–search potential informants’ trash.