saturday reads

At 10 a.m. on Friday July 25th, the House Judiciary Committee will hold a preliminary hearing on the topic of impeachment, with a presentation by Congressman Dennis Kucinich.


A leading cyber-security expert and former adviser to Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) says he has fresh evidence regarding election fraud on Diebold electronic voting machines during the 2002 Georgia gubernatorial and senatorial elections.


Driven by a sour economy and skittish consumers, U.S. business bankruptcies saw their sharpest quarterly rise in two years, jumping 17 percent in the second quarter of 2008, according to an analysis by McClatchy.


TBogg: After the Flood


Netroots Nation: How the Media Learned to Bend Over Backward to Please the Right (Digby, Rick Perlstein, Paul Krugman and Duncan Black)


Belladonna has some advice for the Pope.

friday reads

Dan Froomkin: Mukasey the Obstructionist


emptywheel: Karl Rove was trying to have Patrick Fitzgerald fired while Fitzgerald was still investigating Rove for his role in leaking Valerie Wilson's identity.


ThePoliticalCat - Politics: Is It Impeachment By Another Name?


McSame has attended zero of his committee’s six hearings on Afghanistan over the last two years.


The 10 American Cities Most Likely To Search For Obscene Material


More than 1,200 people in 42 states now have been sickened by a rare strain of salmonella bacteria carried on tomatoes … or maybe hot peppers. Or maybe avocados.

wednesday reads

Glenn Greenwald: The Motivation for Blocking Investigations Into Bush Lawbreaking


Nukes & Spooks: Saddam's Uranium


Cecelia Grimes, the lobbyist and "very good friend" of former Rep. Curt Weldon, has been charged with destroying evidence relating to the federal investigation of the former Pennsylvania congressman. (ken Silverstein has more on the Crazy Curt Weldon investigation.)


A Tiny Revolution: 29 Years Successfully Wasted


the fastest growing faith groups in the country are atheists and nonbelievers.


This is what happens when you overdose on FoxNews.


Colbert’s The Wørd: Priceless

tuesday reads

Foreign mercenaries have joined so-called "war veterans" and militiamen attacking opposition supporters in rural parts of Zimbabwe, human rights workers have confirmed.


Russell Carollo continues his series on 'suspect soldiers' for McClatchy.

Dr. Yasser Salihee was working for Knight Ridder Newspapers in Iraq when an American sniper shot and killed him on June 24, 2005. The Army's investigation absolved the shooter and blamed Salihee. But the investigator was never told that Sgt. Joseph J. Romero was under investigation for drug trafficking, and that three weeks after the Salihee killing those allegations would lead to his being stripped of his sniper rifle and barred from further missions

Fifteen Italian police officers and doctors sentenced to jail for brutally mistreating detainees after the 2001 G8 riots in Genoa were today celebrating their freedom after it became clear none of them would actually serve prison terms.


Jon Swift on The Obama New Yorker Cover.

monday reads

Sudan's president was charged with genocide today, accused of masterminding a campaign to wipe out entire tribes in the war-torn Darfur region


A top Turkish prosecutor has brought charges against 86 people allegedly involved in a coup plot.


The Nato-led effort to subdue the Taliban suffered one of its heaviest blows since the 2001 invasion yesterday when nine US soldiers were killed and 15 other Nato troops injured in a day-long battle in a region close to the Pakistan border.


Tomgram: Collateral Ceremonial Damage


Scott Horton: Six Questions for Jane Mayer, Author of The Dark Side


The nation's terrorist watch list has hit one million names, according to a tally maintained by the American Civil Liberties Union based upon the government's own reported numbers for the size of the list.

San Fermin in Nueva Orleans

Running of the BERGs
Originally uploaded by nola.darling

Big Easy Roller Girls armed with wiffle bats racing down Bourbon Street on a Saturday morning in New Orleans.

San Fermin in Nueva Orleans

Flickr photo pool

sunday reads

Glenn Greenwald: Torture and the rule of law


West seizes £800m-worth of drugs from Iranian ports (The Independent UK)

Worsening tension between Iran and the West has been given a new twist by the revelation that the Royal Navy and allied forces have intercepted smuggled narcotics worth more than £800m coming out of Iranian ports. Much of the money, it is claimed, helps to fund the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Although raids on drugs-carrying dhows have been going on for several months near the sensitive Straits of Hormuz, at the mouth of the Gulf, they have only now been made public. According to military sources, the dhows carrying the narcotics are loaded in a number of small Iranian ports, but Tehran strenuously denies being involved in the illicit trade. It says any Western allegation of a link to trafficking is propaganda, partly aimed at justifying its large-scale naval presence in the area.

Suspect soldiers: Did crimes in U.S. foretell violence in Iraq? (Russell Carollo - Sacramento Bee)

A yearlong examination of military and civilian records by The Sacramento Bee involving hundreds of troops who entered the services since the Iraq war began identified 120 cases of people whose backgrounds should have raised the suspicions of military recruiters, including felony convitions and serious drug, alcohol or mental health problems.

Of those, 70 later were involved in controversial or criminal incidents in Iraq.

[snip]

From 2003 to 2007, the percentage of Army recruits receiving so-called "moral conduct" waivers more than doubled, from 4.6 percent to 11.2 percent. Others, The Bee found, were able to enlist because they had no official criminal record of arrests or convictions, their records were overlooked or prosecutors suspended charges in lieu of military service — akin to a now-defunct Vietnam-era practice in which judges gave defendants a choice between prison and the military.

The Royal Military Police have launched an investigation into an allegation that British soldiers sexually assaulted a 14-year-old Iraqi boy.


Stephen Payne, a Bush pioneer and a political appointee to the Homeland Security Advisory Council, was caught on tape offering access to key members of the Bush administration inner circle in exchange for “six-figure donations to the private library being set up to commemorate Bush’s presidency.”


Frank Rich: The Real-Life '24' of Summer 2008


TPM: White House Releases EPA Report - And Denies Findings Immediately