Tuesday Open Thread

As the history of the Bush Administration is written, more and more will be convinced that it was a miracle of God that humanity survived at all.

A Con-man convinced Bush White House he had a secret decoding technology which could unearth the secret terrorist planning messages embedded in Al Jazeera broadcasts. They even used it as the basis of a terror warning in 2003.

According to Republican Congressman Steve King, ACORN is a scandale a thousand times bigger than Watergate. While it is worthwhile to point out that an independent investigator has determined that nothing illegal has occurred with respect to the “ACORN scandal of the millenium,” but I like this take from BarbinMD of Daily Kos the best:

So, we had secret slush funds, the involvement of the White House, Justice Department, FBI and CIA in the crime and/or the cover-up, the “Saturday Night Massacre,” the prison sentences, and the resignation of a President … versus allegations of voter fraud that has never been proven and a couple of conservatives dressing up like a pimp and a prostitute.

The right wing and their allegations would be a hysterical sitcom if it weren’t for all the dying caused by their demagougery.

David Sirota is a liberal blogger and a writer that I rarely agree with, but his take on the decline of our media and the decline of journalism being represented by the movie Julie & Julia is a very interesting and probably correct read. Take a gander.

If you are a fiscal conservative, then you must support healthcare reform to evade charges of hypocrisy:

Take the CBO estimate of the cost of subsidies and Medicaid expansion in the Senate bill — that is, ignoring all possible cost savings. It’s $179 billion in 2018. Take the CMS projection of total health care spending in 2018: it’s more than $4.5 trillion. So the direct cost of expanding coverage is less than 4 percent of total health care spending. That’s the amount by which, on the current trajectory, health spending rises every 7 months.