bigmagic’s posterous

More via option4.seantevis.com

"Running for Office: Option 4"

The coolest website by a candidate I've ever seen. By Sean Tevis, a Dem and candidate for state rep from Kansas.

h/t DailyKos

There's been sooooo much lately on the Cheney-Bush torture regime that I figure you've likely waded through it and some level, whether TV, print or web. The ongoing debate on just what to do about it is saturating the omniverse of information as well. It's clear to me that we have to 1) have hearings that 2) lead to prosecutions. Done deal, no exceptions. The details of when and where I'll leave to those who will hold them and try them. In the meantime, read Glenn Greenwald, he's pulling all the threads of this mad cluster of political shenanigans together better than anyone else.

Among those threads is: Who exactly doesn't want this thing out in the open? In whose interest is it to have the momentum for a torture investigation die a quiet, typically DC bureaucratic death? Answer: It's not only the Rethugliclowns.

Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com

(I am) arguing that Democrats have blocked investigations into Bush crimes because of how it would implicate them; quoting The New Yorker's Jane Mayer as saying that "many of those who might ordinarily be counted on to lead the charge are themselves compromised"; and quoting Jonathan Turley as saying (on Keith Olbermann's program) that "the Democrats have been silently trying to kill any effort to hold anyone accountable because that list could very well include some of their own members."  

More via salon.com

Having trouble keeping track of all the memos, executive orders, and policy decisions that led the United States into the moral low ground? FP brings you the ultimate guide to the Bush administration's journey to the dark side.

More via foreignpolicy.com

Foreign Policy mag gives an even more complete, but kinda boring Torture Timeline.

So much information about the Bush administration's torture policies and rationales has surfaced in recent days that, contrary to the secrecy meme of those days, we are now in danger of suffering from TMI - too much information.

So I thought it would be helpful to put together a timeline of known facts, reports and claims to try to give some chronological perspective to it all. As with any such collection, the selections are somewhat subjective, but I have tried to be fair (but not balanced; this isn't a sporting event) in including what is known, admitted or reasonably validated. And - for once - I will leave speculation to the comments.

It turns out there is so much information already known that just summarizing it is torture. The timeline thus focuses mainly on the torture memos themselves and the events occurring at the time they were written, tested and replaced.

More via dailykos.com

I'm with this guy, I'm on the verge of TMI too. This timeline is essential to keeping perspective on the torture regime of Cheney-Bush and the Rethugliclowns (and the Dumbocrats that looked the other way, let's not forget).

The Goreacle pounds on a Rethugliclown at a DC climate change hearing.

TPM (TalkingPointsMemo) TV is a terrific source for clips from the days news and an extensive archive. A great place to catch up on the latest - without having to listen to bloviating talking heads and commercials!

Charlie Rose[#15085]
(original broadcast date: 4/24/09)
* A conversation with Bill Ackman (major investor and hedge fund manager of Pershing Square Capital Management LP), and economist Joe Stiglitz
* A conversation with Lionel Barber, editor of the "Financial Times"

Introducing the sharpest knife in the Rethugliclown toolkit, the finest product of conservative edumacation in our great nation. A steady diet of Faux News obviously produces truly awesome results. Let me be the first to nominate "Patriot Dude" for Rethugliclown presidential candidate in 2012. Sarah Palin, watch your back.

I know this is a late entry to the Tea Bag Party catalog but I couldn't pass it up.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Brad DeLong, UC Berkeley Econ prof and major econ guru here at Big Magic blog, knocks one outta the park with a short dissertation about the first Big Bailout.

What? You thought only the current crop of American Banksters were miserable failures? Gentle Reader, read on and be enlightened.

The Panic of 1825

If you’re not satisfied with Paul Krugman or Nouriel Roubini as your guide to the current turmoil, you can always rely on E.M. Forster. It was Forster who grasped the essential drawback of the Internet long before anyone else, depicting, in his 1909 story "The Machine Stops" a world in which individuals communicate in isolation via machine. It turns out he’s pretty good on 21st-century financial crises, too, mostly because the underlying processes remain so similar to those of a financial crisis he studied. Only the scale has changed.

Forster’s great-aunt Marianne Thornton helped raise him after his father's death, leaving him 8,000 pounds upon her death, when Forster was 8. That legacy gave him the financial cushion to become a writer. So he wrote Marianne Thornton: A Domestic Biography 1797-1887, stringing her voluminous letters together with scene-setting prose. As it happens, the fortunes of the Thornton family turn on history’s first episode of successful central banking: the Bank of England's intervention in the 1825 financial crisis.

More via theweek.com

More via travel.nytimes.com

Great piece in the NY Times about the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, an enormous expanse of southwestern Utah. I've been there and it's a spectacular landscape made more dramatic by its remoteness and isolation. If you like your dramatic western landscapes VAST, LARGE and empty of people, this is your spot.

BTW, for those keeping score, this is your tax dollars at work. Pres. Clinton designated the area as a U.S. National Monument in 1996.

There's more good stuff in the wiki too -> Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and a nifty map