When Mr. Ryan”s plan to end Medicare limits the future elderly to a voucher that, according to the CBO, falls thousands of dollars short of the premiums needed to purchase Medicare-equivalent coverage from private insurers, and then tells them they have to purchase private insurance — and purchase only from private insurers without the choice of traditional and cheaper Medicare — then according to Santorum, that’s giving Americans the kind of freedom that thousands of Allied soldiers died to protect.

The Guardian uses an eye-popping stat from a hacker journalist–that a quarter of all hackers are FBI moles–to cement a a story about the FBI infiltrating hacker groups.

When the tipping point is reached, it seems at once both unexpected and completely obvious. We are nearing that tipping point in the United States. We have witnessed the Arab Spring and the blossoming of the European Summer. We ask ourselves if now we will experience the American Autumn.

Weiner: Wasn’t hacked. Sent the tweet out, panicked and said he was hacked. Has had text and phone relationships with six women, some before but some after his marriage. No physical relationship.

The Obama administration has just recommended that the U.S. Supreme Court not hear a case brought by torture victims of Abu Ghraib and other detention centers in Iraq – a recommendation that leaves the Iraqi torture victims without any redress or accountability for those responsible for their torture. Through their case, Saleh v. Titan, these Iraqi civilians, many of whom still suffer from the effects of the physical and psychological harm done to them, seek to hold the two U.S. corporations implicated in their torture – CACI International and L-3 Services (formerly Titan Corporation) – accountable in a U.S. courthouse, and have their case heard by an American jury. The Obama administration has just recommended that the U.S. Supreme Court not hear a case brought by torture victims of Abu Ghraib and other detention centers in Iraq.

A blog post published last week on Naked Capitalism raises an interesting question – what exactly is the Roosevelt legacy? For us at the Roosevelt Institute, we believe it is based in engaging in dialogue and promoting progressive people and ideas. It is also about encouraging young people to get involved in public service and public policy debates.

USA Today has a piece today about Team Obama’s imminent 2012 rebrand. This passage sums up the article well — it completely misses the point.

On an international level I would go so far as to say these three liberal health care plans are all significantly to the right of basically even center-right party in the rest of the industrialized world on health care. “Tort reform” gets more play than single payer. If these constitute the “left flank” of the political discussion around the pressing issue of health care costs in America, we as a country are screwed.

The Obama Administration is floating a steeper drawdown in Afghanistan than they contemplated in previous weeks, due to new “strategic considerations.” While they call the considerations the war’s cost and the killing of Osama bin Laden, the fact that 204 House members just voted for a quicker pullout, and the fact that there’s an election coming up in 2012, are probably the more likely ones.

It is Monday so what do I find in my in-box but another tightly coiled steaming pile of conservative idiocy by Robert Samuelson. It is a real drag to write about him because there really are no snappy pejoratives to describe him that don’t insult the people or item one compares him to. So I am not going to try that today, I am just going to call it straight, Robert Samuelson is a partisan liar.