free

Recrimination tempers mood of celebration as the president warns "inhuman"
conditions that led to accident "will not go unpunished".

Jubilation across Chile as Luis Urzua is brought out of the mine.

Congressional Republicans were all aflutter because Health Care Reform was a 2000+ page bill, and it regulates, albeit rather weakly as it turned out, 16% of the economy. Card-carrying Congressional loons such as Michele Bachmann have called it slavery. Rush Limbaugh said he would move to Costa Rica if it passed. He is still here so one suspects Costa Rica would not have him.

I’ll take Rand Paul at his word. He’s opposed to racial discrimination. However, he obviously supports allowing businesses to engage in racial discrimination without impunity. Evidently, if the government says it’s against the law to run a whites-only business, this is a bridge too far for Rand Paul. Congratulations, Republicans. The man you chose to run for the vacant U.S. Senate seat from Kentucky and the man who delivered the highest profile political victory for the tea party movement has turned out to have some very twisted ideas about civil rights and race.

The Gulf disaster proves, at a minimum, that Sarah Palin’s mindless slogans like ” Drill Baby Drill ” are not enough to make good energy or environmental policy. A video by Americans for America PAC , which I co-direct, tries to make that case as simply as possible, juxtaposing Palin’s chanting tea party hordes with a few images from the Gulf. And yet, even in the face of the greatest disaster the Gulf has ever seen, Palin still refuses to admit any error or nuance. Malia Litman noted Sarah Palin’s reaction to the Gulf Disaster here in HuffPost yesterday.

At its heart, climate change is an overarching symptom of the unsustainability of the current global human enterprise. Many in the United States recognize this, motivating a productive and needed conversation on solutions. As we write, Congress contemplates how the US will address climate change in a way that sustains and improves our economy, and President Obama is encouraging new fuel efficiency standards via the Environmental Protection Agency. In the meantime, however, a war is being waged on the very idea of national sustainability. Indeed, a quixotic, vocal minority in the U.S.

Just when you think it can’t get any stranger in the world of Sarah Palin–with lie after lie piling up like cord wood in the Matunaska Valley–there’s yet another bogus quote from UCLA basketball legend John Wooden in Palin’s memoir Going Rogue , making her two-for-two in misquoting the Wizard of Westwood. That’s good from the free throw line, but not so good in journalism.

“I don’t want our schools turned over to some socialist movement.” It is now official; those looking for the latest GOP conspiracy theory, the latest mighty mental meltdown of the base, eagerly barked out by even the supposed leaders and purported respectable figures of the party, stroked and teased by conservative wings of the press that seem to have no pressing substance to deal with, anymore, compared to these small trinkets of insanity — those looking for that latest race-tinged, conspiracy-riddled drama need look no farther. We have it.

The Republicans need to stop denigrating the troops. They keep saying that the government can’t get anything right. How about the biggest government project of all - the United States Armed Forces? Are the Republicans talking smack about the military - and hence, the troops? Support the troops! Support government! Does anyone disagree that the military is almost entirely government run? And if you agree to that obvious fact, when you attack all government run programs, aren’t you by definition attacking the United States military?

Conservative pundits and politicians so quickly jump all over the Democrats’ attempts to provide health care for all, bemoaning that any expansion of government programs will lead to health care rationing.