A Major Crimes Task Force (MCTF) assisted by the FBI and other US investigators interviewed 77 adult and juvenile detainees. They reported their jailers: forced them to confess to crimes they did not commit, beat them with wooden sticks or subjected them to electric shocks and raped them or sodomized them with objects. Juveniles reported being raped “multiple times by the same person or persons.”

The fact that Schumer took this to the floor means that he obviously sees political opportunity here, but also that this is not a fanciful notion. We really could have another government shutdown threat on our hands.

So simple a concept – but the numnut Republicans in my legislature fail to understand it because they are bathed in homophobia.

Kate and I celebrated the 7th anniversary of our legal marriage in 2011. Thank you, Vancouver, B.C. We flew back home to NC, where our union is not recognized by my state, and won’t be until the U.S. Supreme Court does away with this institutionalized bigotry.

The political theory behind the American Jobs Act is that the President would offer a popular series of job creation measures, get his party and then the public behind them, and pressure Republicans to allow something to get through. In theory, if the programs were well-enough articulated and the Democratic coalition was singing off the same songbook, this could work. Or at least, it would work in political terms, to draw differences between the parties that may bear fruit in elections, if not in immediate policymaking.

So how is that working out?

The reason for-profit medical corporations push for this change is simple. Kicking seniors out of Medicare means they will be forced, by the individual mandate in Obama’s Affordable Care Act, to buy far more expensive, and inefficient, private insurance that pays higher rates for services. The move will also shrink Medicare’s market size, making it harder for Medicare to get the lowest prices for the government as possible.

We’re just going to get trial balloon after trial balloon until next Monday, when the President is set to announce his batch of deficit reduction ideas for the Catfood Commission II. Now the balloon has flown all the way to England, and the offices of the Financial Times.

Speaking of Rick Perry and Gardasil and HPV’s, Michele Bachmann certainly opened up a can of worms (I’m certain that there is a double-entendre that I am missing here, but I’m too tired to go searching for it) for conservatives who are suddenly infected with talking about women’s health, a subject they normally avoid as it were military service/picking up the tab/ a negro.

The group Protect Your Care has put together a mini-site based on the incident in the Republican debate on Monday, where tea party attendees cheered the prospect of allowing an uninsured man to die. The candidate being questioned during that exchange was Ron Paul. It turns out that he has a particular experience with the hypothetical question asked to him by Wolf Blitzer. In fact, his campaign manager from 2008 died from a lack of insurance.

This would not be the first time that the political and policy shops bicker inside a White House. But what’s the claim here? That there was a rash move to make a solar energy investment for political reasons without assessing the risk? Then you have to blame the Bush Administration, which started the loan process with Solyndra as far back as 2006 as part of a previous energy bill.

I realize the headline is a bit obvious, but I think this is the reason the Democrats lost Anthony Weiner’s seat last night.