I’m hearing from sources about a letter to Harry Reid from a collection of liberal Senators, led by Sens. Jay Rockefeller and Sherrod Brown, insisting that Reid publicly commit to putting a public option in any health care bill that reaches the Senate floor.

Those words came from former cattle rancher, Wyoming governor, and US Senator Cliff Hanson, one of the leading voices against the expansion of Grand Teton National Park in the 1940s. I’d love to hear some of today’s GOP senators say the same about health care reform in twenty years.

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.

Speaker Pelosi, the spoiled boys in the Senate left a big mess to clean up: they’ve bagged up more than 50 billion stimulus dollars the addicts from coal and nukes can delay withdrawal from their Treasury subsidies. Like addicts everywhere, the coal and nuke junkies will starve families and steal from strangers to keep the fixes going. Like dealers everywhere, their Senate dealers will sell out the rest of us to keep the fixes coming: they’re planning to sell the junkies over 55 billion of the Treasury’s finest. Speaker Pelosi, how can we help you stop the deal from going down?

45 years ago, John F. Kennedy gave a speech in Berlin, urging those who do not understand freedom to come to Berlin. Steny Hoyer and his Democratic colleagues who are busy carrying water for BushCo’s warrantless wiretapping and telecom immunity might want to listen to what Kennedy had to say.

Forget any bad feelings you may have about Harry Reid. We’ve got three days to make sure he beats Mitch McConnell in an important showdown on FISA on Monday. Here’s what you can do to make sure Reid–and the Democrats–win.

I’d like to believe that Harry Reid pulled the telecom bill yesterday because members of the Senate actually did realize how shameless and horrifying their soliloquies on behalf of the poor beleaguered telecos made them sound, but I’m skeptical. As I listened to Barb “Ma Kettle” Mikulski (D-LCD) on the floor of the Senate pining for the days when “blackberries wuz sumpin’ yew put on yer breakfast cereal,” I didn’t pick up an iota of self awareness that might clue her into the fact that having such an intellectually shiftless luddite as a sitting US Senator, charged with making tech policy, was a national embarrassment. Of course she reached the conclusion the telecoms were great patriots who were only doing their civic duty. She’s thick as a brick.

Let’s not tell lies to ourselves, Americans: the blood is on all our hands. It’s all of our continuing responsibility, not to erase our history or actions, but to make all them public, to change our ways and reform, not because we expect the world to forgive us (would you?), but because there is no other way to rescue ourselves. . . from ourselves.