We activists have years to defeat corporatism: single payer is one front in that very long war. Many of the indigent patients I've seen these last years - like many of the other 40 million uninsured Americans - will perish during that long war. With a robust public option this year, most of these patients will survive.

Today four Northern California animal rights activists await Federal criminal trial for ghastly crimes including passing out leaflets, chalking slogans on pavement, and chanting. Oh, and using the internet to locate the indivduals they were protesting. Yes, the world's only superpower can't be bothered to defend us against banksters' ursury or death from want of health care, but when it comes to leaflets, chalked slogans, and Google searches, they're here for us. To shut us up.

Last week, FOX pulled out all the teabags for their newest victim, a notorious water district in California's San Joaquin Valley. Meet their victim of the month, Westside Water District: half the size of Connecticut, laden with farmers who get triple Federal subsidies (crop, water, electricity), and in hock to us all for $480 million.

This week Blue Dog Congresscritters who rely on fossil cult campaign contributions bribes for their cushy lives bravely suggested that to keep their jobs, we roast a whole planet full of other peoples' kids: Earth. Mass suicide: the "centrist" Democrats' new love. You see, in order for today's kids to survive into their senior years, we adults have to stop increases in global warming gases. Chris Van Hollen and the Blue Dogs want us to do nothing.

In January Amy Gooman's guest Allan Nairn described to Democracy Now's audience how in 1999 Admiral Dennis Blair, Obama's Intel Czar pick, had repeatedly supported Indonesian generals commanding Indonesian death squads in Timor, rather than obey his Commander-In-Chief's lawful orders to tell our client generals in the Indonesian military to shut down their death squads. Today the NY Times reports that last Thursday, as Obama released the torture memos and his Adminstration told us the torture failed to produce useful results, Admiral Blair told the intel community the exact opposite. Who does Dennis Blair serve - America's elected leaders, or the torture and death squad operatives?

Ohio pig isolates are the most closely related to the new Texas and California human isolates.

Yesterday PEER reported that President Obama asked a Bushie lawyer who spent years battling for mountain top destruction coal mining to run the Federal agency that regulates mountain top destruction mining. Change you can believe in? Yes - if you believe in hiring one of Steven Griles' helpers and forever burying ancient streams and hollows under toxic coal mining waste in a mad rush to roast the planet.

The "torture memos" released Thursday show us how America's gulags systematically and deliberately committed torture - a war crime - under explicit polcies of the Bush White House Office of Legal Counsel. President Obama's decision to release the torture memos is a major step forward for the rule of law.

It's back! Remember the 50 billion the world's greatest zombie-feeding station debate club wanted to give away to those nice folks who just can't keep their nuclear waste to themselves? Remember how the nuclear pork had mutated into a part of the stimulus bill, and how the House/Senate conferees excised the whole thing in February?

Tonight Toby Warrick and Julie Tate at the Washington Post report that earlier this evening at the New York Review of Books Mark Danner posted the Red Cross' secret February 17, 2007 report to CIA acting general counsel John Rizzo. Danner's account, like Warren and Tate's earlier work, reveals what the Red Cross saw in America's gulags.