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Yoo hoo, Mr. Holder! Gee, after reading this post by Scott Horton, it seems like Dick Cheney is just asking to be prosecuted - why not give him what he wants?

After he was indicted for the murder of Alexander Hamilton, vice president Aaron Burr fled to South Carolina, to hide out with his daughter. Another vice president, Spiro Agnew, kept completely silent before pleading nolo contendere on corruption charges. Former vice president Dick Cheney, on the other hand, seems proud of his criminal misadventures. On Sunday, he took to the airwaves to brag about them.

“I was a big supporter of waterboarding,” Cheney said in an appearance on ABC’s This Week on Sunday. He went on to explain that Justice Department lawyers had been instructed to write legal opinions to cover the use of this and other torture techniques after the White House had settled on them.

Section 2340A of the federal criminal code makes it an offense to torture or to conspire to torture. Violators are subject to jail terms or to death in appropriate cases, as where death results from the application of torture techniques. Prosecutors have argued that a criminal investigation into torture undertaken with the direction of the Bush White House would raise complex legal issues, and proof would be difficult. But what about cases in which an instigator openly and notoriously brags about his role in torture? Cheney told Jonathan Karl that he used his position within the National Security Council to advocate for the use of waterboarding and other torture techniques. Former CIA agent John Kiriakou and others have confirmed that when waterboarding was administered, it was only after receiving NSC clearance.

Hence, Cheney was not speaking hypothetically but admitting his involvement in the process that led to decisions to waterboard in at least three cases.

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Now that it's embraced its inner right-wing populist by sponsoring all those 'Tea Parties,' Fox News is going straight for the moonshine by promoting "state sovereignty" advocates who, as we mentioned yesterday, are the "Patriot" movement activists who were promoting militias in the 1990s.

Glenn Beck featured an entire hour devoted to the subject yesterday, while Neil Cavuto warmed up the subject for him by featuring a segment on the subject as well. And both of them featured people who have been heavily involved in promoting "Patriot" belief systems for years.

The most striking, of course, was Beck's hourlong "The Civilest War" program, which early on featured Beck adapting Martin Niemoller's famous "First they came" poem -- about the Nazis and the Holocaust -- to our present-day circumstances:

I think this is the problem. First they came for the banks. I wasn't a banker, I didn't really care. I didn't stand up and say anything. Then they came for the AIG executives. Then they came for the car companies. Until it gets down to you. Most people don't see -- they are coming for you at some point! You're on the list! Everybody's on the list. You may not be rich -- as currently defined.

Because, of course, bailing out failing banks and insurance companies and auto manufacturers is just like rounding up minorities and hauling them away to death camps.

As if that weren't enough bats--t crazy paranoia, much of the rest of the hour was devoted to similarly crazy talk from his participants. A Republican Utah legislator rants about "liberties and freedoms being destroyed" and the "tyranny of the federal government." Another Republican legislator, this time from Texas, talks about how Obama and the Democrats are creating "a socialist state".

Beck also calls upon a right-wing historian named Kevin Gutzman, who even his fellow right-wingers dismiss as a neo-Confederate, obsessed with a misreading of early American history that is like so many other "constitutionalist" interpretations, based on an originalism that would destroy such innovations as the abolition of slavery and women's suffrage (not to mention nearly everything else). [More on that below.]

But everything comes into sharp focus when Beck calls on Gary Marbut -- who Beck describes as the originator of the Montana gun law that inspired all these other legislators. We listen to Marbut's wisdom and absorb his advice in this show; indeed, Beck wraps up by calling on Marbut to tell us "what we've learned."

Marbut, you see, has been a fixture on the far right in Montana for many years. He's never actually been elected to any office at all, though he has run numerous times, because Montanans are all too well aware just how radical a nutcase the guy is.

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via FreePress.net:

Our nation's founders understood the First Amendment would be worth little without a postal system that encouraged broad public participation in America's "marketplace of ideas."[..]

Other founders soon came to understand that the press as a political institution needed to be supported through favorable postal rates. President George Washington spoke out for free postage for newspapers through the mail, and Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton -- no proponent of government deficit -- conceded that incentives were necessary to spawn a viable press.

The postal policies that resulted have lasted for more than 200 years, spurring a vibrant political culture in the United States. They have eased the entry of diverse political viewpoints into a national discourse often dominated by the largest media organizations.

All of this could change in 2007.

In an unprecedented move, the agency that oversees postal rates in the United States has quietly attempted to unravel much of what the founders accomplished. Earlier this year, the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) rejected a postal rate increase plan offered by the U.S. Postal Service. Instead they opted to implement a complicated plan submitted by media giant Time Warner. (Click here to read the decision and click here for a timeline)

Read full article here

FreePress has a letter to the Postal Board of Governors and your congresspeople asking them to fight against this. Please consider adding your name. Making it harder for smaller voices to be heard in the sea of giant conglomerations controlling multiple media outlets only hurts us as citizens and as a democracy.

Jon joined Larry King last night and talked about the administration and Democrats in depth. Larry asks him if he'd like things to be bad, kinda like O'Reilly saying that left wing websites want the US to fail because Bush is in charge.
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(transcript)

KING: You don't want Medicare to fail?

STEWART: Are you insane?

KING: No.

STEWART: You're literally asking me if I would prefer -- yes, Larry, what I'm saying to you as a comedian I want old people to suffer, old and poor people to suffer. That is -- that is -- what we want is -- what seems absurd to me is the length that Washington just seems out of touch with the desires of Americans to be spoken to as though they are adults.

I mean when you listen to Bush's speeches, and I'm leaving the Democrats out because I honestly don't feel that they make an impact. They have 49 percent of the vote and three percent of the power. At a certain point you go "Guys, pick up your game."

But Bush, you know the other day when he had the speech about us being addicted to oil, he says those things as though, you know, he just thought of it and we're disagreeing with him, like everybody's been saying that. Jimmy Carter said it I think in 1978.

And he comes out, "What people don't realize is we're addicted to foreign oil" and he's saying it like you're going "Get out of here." We're addicted. You don't get it people. You know he was the guy on the stump a few years ago making fun of hybrid cars because it wasn't manly. And -- and his vice president did shoot a 78-year-old man in the face. Aaron Burr was the last vice president to shoot a guy in the face, Alexander Hamilton.

KING: And that was a duel.

STEWART: That was a duel based on personal integrity. This vice president thought a 78-year-old man was a bird. It happens. What are you going to do?

KING: We've declined as a society right?

STEWART: I cannot tell you how many times I'll turn around and go, "Grandpa," oh no it's a pigeon.

The Rude One gives em' a History Lesson:

Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist 78 that the judiciary 'will always be the least dangerous' branch of government because it has the least capacity to 'annoy or injure' our constitutional rights." Actually, Hamilton said that it was the "least dangerous" because it can't summon the military or write laws. But knowing that would require reading past the first couple of lines of the document...read on

As always Rude...but true.

(Update): MoveLeft has more on Hamilton and Cornyn.