Forget all that talk about minivans and barely making ends meet. There’s one reason the House Tea Party Caucus does right by millionaires when they stand up and have their votes counted. They are millionaires.

It turns out that the Justice Department is not only concerned with Standard and Poor’s but the entire credit rating agency industry, it appears. The reported investigation into the ratings of mortgage backed securities during the housing bubble is centered on S&P, but not limited to them.

Daniel Domscheit-Berg (DDB), founder of OpenLeaks who defected from the media organization WikiLeaks last year, has apparently destroyed a cache of documents he stole from WikiLeaks when he left the organization. According to reporter Holger Stark of the German news organization Der Spiegel, Domscheit-Berg told Stark some time on August 20 that the cache was gone forever.

This morning, while 50 of their friends faced another day in jail, 45 more Americans were arrested as part of an ongoing sit-in at the White House. The DC Park Police have been telling organizers of the sit-in that they were keeping the first wave of demonstrators in jail to deter people from taking part in the civil disobedience. In fact, the arrests have just the opposite effect.

There have been a lot of false starts and dashed hopes in Libya for the rebel forces. Indeed this is the second time they’ve captured Zawiya, seen as the decisive city on the road to Tripoli. But this time appears different, mainly because the rebels have cut off the supply lines to the main oil refinery, and more important, the people of Tripoli have risen up against the Gadhafi regime.

Yesterday I was sitting on my brother-in-law’s deck in sunny Santa Barbara reading Maria Armoudian’s new book, Kill the Messenger: The Media’s Role in the Fate of the World. I was incredibly grateful for the sun because the first three chapters are grim. She covers the media’s role in the Rwandan genocide, the Holocaust and the Bosnian war. Thankfully I could look up and see hummingbirds after every chapter. Then she moved onto where the media worked constructively by aiding the peace process in Northern Ireland, rebuilding democracy in Chile, bridging ethnic divides in South Africa, improving the lives of women in Senegal –by changing the attitude toward female genital cutting (FGC), and boosting transparency and democratization in Mexico and Taiwan.

John Chandley, Dan Choi and Bill McKibben are spending tonight in jail again so that the government can send a message to you on behalf of the oil companies. They don’t want you to come to Washington for the next two weeks and overburden the DC jail system by throwing your body upon the gears, to quote Mario Savio. They hope you will look at what is happening to John and Dan and Bill and be intimidated and discouraged.

There were 45 more people today who refused to be discouraged. They watched what happened to Dan and John and Bill and were willing to get arrested anyway, in the hope of “lighting a fire” under the world.

Are you discouraged?

So to summarize, the current leader of the “left” is a Blue Dog who thinks partisan politics are a quaint relic, while the entire right believes the opposite and desperately wants to nominate the wingnuttiest presidential candidate, ever.

No one should be allowed to evade responsibility on the theory that collective guilt creates individual exoneration.

Jonathon Swift went too far in his “A Modest Proposal” (1729) when he proposed the eating of human children as a solution to Ireland’s economic woes and the plight of the hungry poor. If we were looking for a solution to our own economic crisis that might be acceptable to more people, and so better suited to a democracy, wouldn’t it be efficacious to simply let the hungry youngsters starve to death?