Jane Hamsher

This weekend brings brings two great America traditions together:  Barbecue and Liberace.

The bad design of the employer mandate in the Affordable Care Act has led some businesses to look at cutting part-time employee’s work to just under the 30 hour threshold, but that is not the only loophole business could exploit. Because the new law doesn’t apply the same standards to large businesses and self-insured companies they may theoretically avoid the mandate by offering what is basically just insurance in name only. From the Wall Street Journal:

Think Progress, the blog for the non-partisan Center On American Progress, has made a name for itself pretending to be a “progressive” news and analysis site despite reflexively defending the Democratic Party and being funded by an organization that refuses to disclose its donors (one hint it means “to soar” in Esperanto). But now the site has gone from being a party organ dishonestly posing as a group of principled activists into defending the most Nixonian practices of the Obama Administration.

The US Justice Department’s secret seizure of phone records of reporters and editors at the Associated Press is nothing less than a continuation of attacks on freedom of the press that have been ongoing under the administration of President Barack Obama.

Carl Bernstein, famed investigative journalist who broke the story on the Watergate scandal with Bob Woodward, appeared on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” and declared this is a “matter of policy.” It goes right up to the president and the people who surround him, the very officials who have waged an unprecedented war on whistleblowers and leaks.

Fears that the Syrian Civil War would cause further regional instability seem to have been justified as the Syrian government has stated that airstrikes from Israel constitute a declaration of war. A war between Syria and Israel could draw Iran and the United States directly into the conflict.

A new Cyprus bailout deal worth 10 billion euros was announced today by EU leaders which involved shutting down one of the country’s largest banks. The deadline for such a deal was set for today by the European Central Bank.

A federal appeals court is hearing argument over whether the government should have to obtain a warrant before using GPS tracking. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is in court to argue against warrantless GPS tracking.

I won’t swear to it, but on the drive back from Albany it did occur to me that the decision to sell LIPA’s T&D system to National Grid for somewhere south of the $4Billion price LIPA paid for it back in the 1990’s might have already been made, and all these non transparent studies are actually investigations that could instead be casting about looking for “facts” they can back into a pre-ordained conclusion. Instead of the facts leading to a conclusion, could there be a foregone conclusion in search of some facts to support it? Maybe that’s why these investigations are so secretive?

Facebook Inc. is done with the pretense of Silicon Valley meritocracy and has moved on to Corporate American crony capitalism taking a multimillion dollar tax break according to Citizens for Tax Justice.

Going in, I was of mixed views regarding Sunday’s rally in Washington, D.C., to save the earth’s climate from the tar sands pipeline. I still am. Why on a Sunday when there’s no government around to protest, shut down, or interfere with?