Beyond Charles Manson himself, Susan Atkins was the most public face of his murderous family during the 1970-71 Tate-LaBianca trial. She bragged about stabbing the pregnant Sharon Tate and laughed when details of the slaying were presented in court. Her death sentence was later changed to life imprisonment and now Atkins, who says she has found God and her sins have been forgiven, is asking to be released from prison because she is terminally ill. Should she be?

As you know if you are a reader of this or any number of other blogs, The New York Times broke a biggie yesterday in reporting that the Pentagon knowingly employed torture techniques that the Communist Chinese used on U.S. airmen during the Korean War to extract false confessions from them. But if your diet is heavy with right-of-center blogs you probably wouldn’t have read a peep about this latest revelation regarding one of the darkest chapters in the history of a country that will be celebrating...

The concept of national service is for me a no-brainer because it is a great way to give something back to the U.S. and even our erstwhile friends overseas while receiving valuable training and experience in return. I suppose the very fact that it makes such sense is why we haven’t heard much about it during a presidency that has made as its centerpiece a war that has bankrupted the national treasury and for which it has asked no one to sacrifice. The first and subsequent times I heard Barack...

Rick Moran is again liveblogging from the Continental Congress.

THE SNARK AND THE MASTERMIND The more we learn about the Bush torture regime, the more apparent it becomes that there is an interconnectivity between what once seemed random acts and events: False confessions are coerced from tortured detainees using Chinese Communist techniques perfected on U.S. fliers during the Korean War. Ethnic Muslims considered by the Chinese to be enemies of the state are held indefinitely by the U.S. and worked over at the request of Beijing’s interrogators. And so...

Remember when conservatives warned that dope-smoking hippies were going to destroy America? How ironic since it is our conservative leaders who are doing most of the damage. While those oh-so-liberal Democrats will no doubt have their own chance to screw things up and as it is have been feckless helpmates of the Republicans, the fallout from the 1994 Contract on America through George Bush’s Reign of Error is simply mind-boggling: * Tax cuts for the rich at the expense of everyone else, including...

I don’t suffer fools gladly, so I kept MoveOn at arm’s length in 2004 and 2006, but after the General Betrayus ad controversy last year finally concluded that these trash talking and tone deaf so-called progressives are bound to do more harm than good as Barack Obama leads the charge to end the Republican hegemony in Washington. And so it was gratifying when the presumptive Democratic nominee gently but necessarily chided MoveOn in his speech on patriotism yesterday in saying: “[S]ome...

That Barack Obama felt compelled to give a speech today on patriotism speaks volumes about the lousy state of political discourse in the U.S. That few minds will be changed although the speech was a noble effort is a fact of life for this African-American with a foreign-sounding middle name and an opposition with toxic intentions. That there are so many real issues crying out for attention in this deeply troubled land as the July 4th holiday draws near and he feels the need to wrap himself in...

Let’s be really clear about a consequence of the enormous stress that Americans are under because of the ongoing economic meltdown: People are going to die. People are going to die because their cars run out of $5 per gallon gas on some godforsaken back road. People are going to die because “compassionate conservatism” was a Republican focus-group talking point and not a way for the government to give a leg up to people in need. People are going to die this summer because they...

Entire forests have been pulped to provide the paper for all of the commentaries in the day and a half since the Supreme Court overturned the District of Columbia’s handgun ban, but when all is said and done this is what it comes down to: Justice Antonin Scalia, who in vociferously opposing the majority in the Gitmo detainee decision two weeks ago wrote that it “will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed,” has no such concern when it comes ignoring the literal meaning...

. To visit the homes of many famous people is usually not to really know them. A conspicuous exception is Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, the third president’s self-designed masterpiece of Palladian architecture where he lived for 56 historic years — from 1770 before he wrote the Declaration of Independence until his death on July 4, 1826. Monticello, Italian for “little mountain,” sits atop an 850-foot peak in the Southwest Mountains above Charlottesville, Virginia and...

There has been a . . . um, surge of revisionist thinking lately over the Iraq war in general and the Surge strategy in particular, and you may find yourself climbing aboard the Mission Finally Accomplished bandwagon. If so, then you’d better fasten your seatbelt because you’re forgetting the past, are going skin deep on the present and giving short shrift to the treacherous future. That is something that I will not do, which is why my own Iraq war mea culpa is still on ice and likely...

There is something comical but ultimately rather sad about the widespread dropping of jaws over Barack Obama’s support of the expansion of government surveillance powers and other recent actions that reveal him to be someone whom he has been all along — a hard assed and thoroughly pragmatic politician who does not walk on water but has been astute at harnessing this image to power his own ambitious path to the Democratic presidential nomination and White House. Part of the disappointment...

Condi studies briefing paper on Al Qaeda threat; Twin towers burn Inconveniently for the Bush administration and presidential wannabe John McCain, the historic record showing that the White House slept while Osama bin Laden and his merry band of terrorists planned the 9/11 attacks continues to grow, which effectively undercuts allegations that Barack Obama (and John Kerry before him in 2004) have dangerously naive “9/10″ mindsets.” The GOP noise machine is working hard to drown...

GERMAN POWs CAPTURED BY U.S. TROOPS; PROFESSOR JOHN YOO I have not supported calls to oust John Yoo from his tenured position at the UC Berkeley School of Law because of his despicable and key role in the Bush administration torture regime, but after reading his op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal this week I am changing my mind. This is because the man who wrote the infamous memo justifying the use of Nazi-like torture techniques is so willfully ignorant. Yoo noted in the op-ed that last week’s...

Charisse with Kelly (top) in Singin’ in the Rain and Astaire in Bandwagon Let’s get the physical stuff out of the way first: Cyd Charisse had the finest legs in Hollywood, was the greatest dancer – and unquestionably the most sensuous — to ever grace the silver screen in a skirt and was every bit as good as the great Fred Astaire and the almost as great Gene Kelly.

. . . Which makes calls for a boycott against The Associated Press because of its warning that using wire service content in the form of excerpts and links without payment is in violation of copyright law is misguided — or to put it in terms that some bloggers would understand, it’s plain stoopid. I seem to be in the minority on this point of view, and there are some heavyweights like Jeff Jarvis in the majority, although Jeff later more or less came to his senses and is now proposing...

You will not be able to stay home, brother. You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out. You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip, Skip out for beer during commercials, Because the revolution will not be televised. – GIL SCOTT-HERON Perhaps the biggest disconnect between the core conservative tenet that the less government and the less obtrusive government the better and the actions of our president, who turned out to be such a faux conservative, are his unprecedented...

Tim Russert at a basketball game with James Carville I am not a contrarian by nature and feel bad when I hurt people’s feelings, and I have held off writing about NBC News’s Tim Russert, who passed away on Friday of a heart attack at age 58, because of the strange double standard we have about speaking ill of the famous dead. But a hopefully respectful amount of time has passed, as well as Father’s Day, so here goes: I felt embarrassed watching the orgy of self-important coverage about...

DESTRY RIDES AGAIN (TOP) AND THE RED SHOES Who doesn’t love a good movie? Whether they’re great art or great trash, there is no medium that can enrapture, entertain and offer escape from the real world, especially in these troubling times. In that spirit, I’m doing a Super Cinema Sunday over at my blog: PAULINE KAEL: AN APPRECIATION is the 18th in a series of essays on people who have moved and inspired me over the years. Herein I note that we may have legendary movie critic Kael,...

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki says that talks on a status-of-forces agreement that would give the U.S. the ranch and Iraq the specter of an American military presence without end are kaput. Al-Maliki said the initial framework agreed upon was to have been an accord “between two completely sovereign states,” but the U.S. proposals “do not take into consideration Iraq’s sovereignty.” Well, it’s like obvious, man, that this is a bargaining ploy on the PM’s...

The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times. Liberty and security can be reconciled; and in our system they are reconciled within the framework of the law. The Framers decided that habeas corpus, a right of first importance, must be a part of that framework, a part of that law. – JUSTICE KENNEDY The mere notion that The Great Writ should not apply to the people that a presidential administration views to be enemies is so un-American that it still...

In yet another blow to the Bush administration’s torture regime, the Supreme Court ruled today that terrorism suspects at the Guantánamo Bay branch of the Rumsfeld Gulag have constitutional rights and can appeal their cases to civilian courts. The 5-4 vote, with liberal justices in the majority, was the third setback handed the Bush administration by the top court over the treatment of prisoners who are being held indefinitely and without charges at the U.S. naval base in Cuba and sought to...

Like radio waves reaching earth from some cosmic calamity millennia ago, the yarbling of Hillary Clinton sycophants who believe that her candidacy was gang banged into extinction by the mainstream media, right-wing bloggers and Barack Obama acolytes can be faintly heard, although it is so much background noise as Clinton herself and practically everyone else who is determined to take back America link arms and march toward November. Has it only been five days since Clinton’s extraordinarily gracious...

You have to hand it to George Bush and John McCain. Both are willfully deaf, dumb and blind when it comes to the Iraq war. That already has irreparably tarnished the president’s legacy and eventually may do irreparable harm to the campaign of the man who wants to succeed him. The president, wearing his pity hat, told the British newspaper The Times that everything would be copasetic with the war and the world view of the U.S. would not be so gosh darned negative if only he “could have used...