I tweeted on this last night, but I thought I’d link here to the NYT story: Seven months after taking office, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is reshaping the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division by pushing it back into some of the most important areas of American political life, including voting rights, housing, employment, bank lending practices and redistricting after the 2010 census. As part of this shift, the Obama administration is planning a major revival of high-impact civil...

It’s often edifying when Republicans show their true colors, even if they’re not exactly “beautiful like a rainbow.” On health-care reform specifically, Republicans on Capitol Hill have for the most part either been obstructionists or outright opponents, spinning about “socialism” and “death panels” with all the strength they could muster, much of it latching on with an irresponsible media establishment that emphasizes not the facts, not the truth,...

Well, the Republicans are to blame, of course. But, for Democrats, here’s some much-needed perspective from TNR’s Jon Chait: The Senate is what controls the process. That’s the chokepoint for any health care bill. The question isn’t how badly Obama wants a public plan, or how much he cares about bipartisanship. It’s whether moderate to conservative Democrats in the Senate will filibuster a bill that has a public plan or lacks GOP support. Everything else is details. In...

Guest post by Frankie Sturm Frankie Sturm is communications director at the Truman National Security Project and a freelance journalist. Ed. note: As part of our ongoing relationship with the Truman National Security Project, I’m pleased to announce that we’ll be cross-posting some pieces from Operation FREE, a new initiative that seeks to raise awareness about the links between climate change, energy, and national security — an extemely worthwhile endeavour, to be sure. Operation...

So. Is the “public option” dead or not? One of the Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee, Kent Conrad, says it is. (And I responded yesterday.) Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius says is it as well… or not. Therein lies some confusion, and she may very well herself be confused. She seemed to back it on This Week (ABC) yesterday, only to pull back on State of the Union (CNN). As she explains on the latter, the “public option” is “not the essential...

One of Obama’s leading foreign policy gurus isn’t terribly enthusiastic about the current direction, such as there is one, of the Afghan war: Seventy-five U.S. and NATO troops died in Afghanistan in July, the deadliest month for allied forces in nearly eight years of fighting. More than 1,000 Afghan civilians have died this year, up 24 percent from 2008. Tens of thousands more American troops are en route, adding to the approximately 90,000 troops, both U.S. and allied, already on the...

“The American people remain anxious and confused about health care reform,” observes Marc Ambinder. “That is an underlying reality that Republican activists are so eager to exploit.” Yes, but it is also Republican activism — in the form of lies, distortions, and propagandistic fearmongering — that has manufactured much of the confusion and anxiety out there. Otherwise, Ambinder is right that “the loudest voices [have] tended to be the craziest, the most extreme,...

As the economy stabilizes, or appears to, with the prospect of a rebound on the horizon, if still a long way off, a major concern is that any genuine recovery will be largely a jobless one, with unemployment remaining high even as other economic indicators show improvement. This may not be the case, however. As Jon Chait noted at The Plank, citing the WSJ, the job losses have been largely service-relative, not manufacturing-related, as the service industry has “come to dominate U.S. employment.”...

He wasn’t a cinematic master, by any means, but he was one of the most distinctive American filmmakers of his generation, and it is indeed difficult to imagine American cinema in the ’80s without him. John Hughes died yesterday at the age of 59. I was a bit too young, at the time, for his early seminal movies, such as Sixteen Candles (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985), and even Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) and Planes, Trains & Automobiles (1987), and yet I came to love the...

So you know how CNN’s medical guru, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, is a Big Pharma flack? Well, it looks like, at least when it comes to health-care reform, the whole network is in the pocket of Big Insurance as well. As Greg Sargent reports at The Plum Line, CNN has refused to air an ad from Americans United for Change criticizing “insurance companies and Republicans.” The official excuse is that the ad targets a specific insurance CEO by name, Cigna’s Ed Hanway, who makes over $12 million...

I tweeted a bit on this last night, but I must stress again: The response from certain right-wingers to Bill Clinton’s trip to North Korea to free the two American prisoners is simply appalling. Apparently, Krauthammer, Bolton, Morris, and their cruel and wrong ilk would rather Laura Ling and Euna Lee have rotted away in a totalitarian labour camp. They claim, without actually knowing any of the specifics (they’re full of idle, partisan speculation, as usual), that the U.S. must have...

Good news for Democrats, I suppose. Sen. John Ensign of Nevada — he with the mistress and the cuckolded husband on his staff, he with the parents paying the mistress off, etc. — has announced that he has no intention of resigning and will run for re-election in 2012. Let the “breathtaking hypocrisy” continue! (Cross-posted from The Reaction.) EDITOR’s NOTE: This post was supposed to go up on July 15 but due to a technical glitch it failed to appear.

I haven’t written on the Mark Sanford saga in a while — mainly because there hasn’t been much new/newsworthy to report (he’s still in office and he’s apparently trying to reconcile with his wife), but also because, I admit, I grew tired of it — but The State has some new details on Sanford’s trip to Argentina to see his mistress (or, to be more precise, on the story he spun to cover up that trip) that make his irresponsible actions all the more disturbing: Gov....

House Democrats released their long-awaited health-care reform bill yesterday, and the plan it proposes includes a government-run component (a so-called “public option”). No, it’s not exactly the single-payer, universal system that many of us prefer (and that we have here in Canada), but it’s comprehensive and ground-breaking, and likely would ensure coverage for the vast majority of Americans — in fact, almost all of them. The right, of course, is already objecting...

Sonia Sotomayor will be confirmed easily by the Senate, with substantial Republican support, but Conservatives like Dear Leader Rush will continue to take ugly swipes at her, just as they have all along. But no matter. She is, as she proved once again yesterday, with her opening statement, a remarkable woman and an impressive jurist. Yes, she said all the right things, and her statement was nothing if not carefully crafted, but there is no denying, I think, her qualifications for the highest court...

President Obama today introduced Dr. Regina Benjamin as the new U.S. surgeon general (pending confirmation, of course). I don’t know anything about her — in fact, I’d never heard of her until today. Looking over her career accomplishments, though — notably: family physician, founder of the Bayou La Batre Rural Health Clinic (which was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina), government appointee (both federally and in Alabama), current president of the Alabama Medical Association...

By now, I suspect, many of you have read, or at least read about, Newsweek’s article on Attorney General Eric Holder and the possible appointment of “a prosecutor to investigate the Bush administration’s brutal interrogation practices” (i.e., torture). Like Glenn Greenwald, I was, initially, optimistic. Finally, I thought. It’s about time. And, like Creature, I was also firmly in “the I’ll-believe-it-when-I-see-it camp.” Well, it looks like Glenn is...

On Tuesday, Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina, one of the more extreme of Congressional Republicans, said this at the National Press Club: They understand socialism. They understand tyrants. But none of us have ever had it here. We don’t even know what it looks like. Part of what we’re trying to do in Saving Freedom [his book] is just show that where we are, we’re about where Germany was before World War II where they became a social democracy. Now, what did he mean by that? To...

So Jeb Bush, according to Tucker Carlson, may be, whether he knows it or not, the future of the Republican Party. That’s right, as if two Bushes haven’t been more than enough, another — this time the smart one, at least when compared to his more famous brother, Obama’s predecessor — may be on the way to presidential politics. If, that is, he can find a way back to high-level elected politics at all. You can read the Jeb-Tucker interview here. It was published just yesterday...

Roll Call: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Tuesday strongly urged Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) to drop a proposal to tax health benefits and stop chasing Republican votes on a massive health care reform bill. Reid, whose leadership is considered crucial if President Barack Obama is to deliver on his promise of enacting health care reform this year, offered the directive to Baucus through an intermediary after consulting with Senate Democratic leaders during Tuesday morning’s...

Whether we like it or not, we’re being bombarded with all things Sarah Palin, more so now pre-resignation than at any time since last year’s campaign. And, honestly, it was driving me nuts over the weekend. But the right loves her, and continues not just to apologize for her, not just to cheerlead for her, but to pump her up out of all justifiable proportion. Which is fine, when you think about it, because the simple fact is, she’s not — and is not close to being —...

I’ve written a lot already on the whole Mark Sanford saga and I don’t intend to write too much more on it this morning. Let me just say this: Is it really necessary to delve into the man’s psyche, and specifically to do so without actually examining him, and, what’s more, so publicly? He does seem to be going through some sort of adolescent mid-life crisis. And he does seem to be something of a narcissist. But what’s with one of his home-state publications, The State,...

Simply, the tide is rising against him. His Argentine mistress was his “soul mate,” he claims, but he wants to reconcile with his wife? Okay, but what does his wife think of that? “This was a whole lot more than a simple affair, this was a love story. A forbidden one, a tragic one, but a love story at the end of the day.” Sure, I get that. And, in a way, I feel for him — and I feel sorry for him. It must be difficult to have all this out in the open. He admits that there...

Maybe you read about it at Crooks and Liars (which has the video), maybe you heard about last night on The Daily Show. Here’s what Michael Scheuer told Glenn Beck, crazy meets crazy, on Tuesday: The only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States. Because it’s going to take a grass-roots, bottom-up pressure. Because these politicians prize their office, prize the praise of the media and the Europeans. It’s...

His death, at the age of 97, won’t get nearly the attention that Michael Jackson’s got, or perhaps even that Farrah Fawcett’s got, but Karl Malden was truly one of the great American artists of the last century, an exceptional film actor who starred in over 50 movies, including A Streetcar Named Desire (1951 — for which he won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor), On the Waterfront (1954 — as in Streetcar, playing opposite one of Marlon Brando’s iconic roles),...