There’s the cliched phrase: “It’s like watching a train wreck.” In “Terror in Mumbai,” which airs tonight 8 pm ET/PT on HBO, you get to see what no documentary has shown before: a “360 degree view” of a multi-pronged terrorist act, seen partly and genuinely from the terrorists point view. The reason: “Terror in Mumbai” uses actual cell phone instructional...

The entire text is online. It’s 2,074 pages. Via Ron Chusid, who has a reading plan:

A new study out from George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services concludes that the Stupak-Pitts Amendment will have an expansive effect on abortion coverage over the entire insurance industry, “eliminating coverage of medically indicated abortions over time for all women, not only those whose coverage is derived through a health insurance exchange.”

Some Christian conservatives are now praying for God to kill Barack Obama.

In the years that we have pursued this project, today’s posting is one of the strangest international press articles I can recall. And while it indicates that Hamas may be allowing more press freedom than we thought – the conclusions of the author are anything but comforting. Keeping in mind that the accused killer is of Palestinian origin, the author of this article from the Al Watan Voice, a newspaper...

Brain Chemicals, Not Will Alone We don’t know the qualified diagnoses of Nidal Hasan. But it may have markers of a serious chemicological and brain disturbance. The subject about how the brain chemicals in the body can go haywire, wrongly signaling a person about events and stimulii around them, causing interpretations and behavior that are either too much or too little– is a subject so large that...

There seems to be a deep-seated need by some folks to cast Major Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, as something — anything – other than a religious fanatic who killed in the name of his religion. In spite of the ever-mounting information regarding his extremism, his self-declared status as a “Soldier of Allah”, his statements that he viewed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as a war on his...

Americans such as myself step into troubled waters when we try to understand why an Army shrink would kill 13 and wound 33 on the pretext he didn’t want to be assigned to Afghanistan. Therefore, I find it not at all unusual that today’s authors of Op-Ed columns in today’s Los Angeles Times argue amongst themselves. The issue is not whether Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan committed a terrorist act. He...

CAPTIONS SAYS: ‘DREAM OF THE ARABS’, AS A ‘ZIONIST’ ARM PUNCTURES THE BALLOON OF THE DREAM Continuing our coverage of the global reaction to the Fort Hood killings, this morning we posted this Arabic op-ed from the United Arab Emirates – a moderate Arab state considered friendly toward the United States. Writing for the Dar Al Khaleej, columnist Saad Mehyo suggests a common Arab...

Steve Benen:

One of the few fundamental rights in America which should never have really generated any controversy is the freedom of religion. On the surface, it seems pretty simple. In layman’s terms, this is a country where you can follow any religion or none at all, as you see fit, and the government shall make no law, etc. etc. etc. And yet, I begin to wonder about the wisdom of the founders when I read stories...

More than Political Correctness or Victimhood at Work in Fort Hood Attack by Rick Moran We all like things to be simple. This is probably due to an evolutionary quirk that rewarded simpleminded hominids who didn’t expend the enormous energy in calories that would have required us to think hard about something. The brain eats up about 40% of our caloric intake so it makes sense that those early pre-homo...

Digby is fed up with paying for Viagra:

I’m facing a moral crises over some fundamental issues regarding health reform legislation. First, I believe a woman has the right to choose an abortion, not the government nor any religious organization. At the same time, I would not encourage my wife to abort our child unless it would save her life. Second, as a policy issue, I have no moral grounds to oppose the Hyde Amendment which essentially prohibits...

This GUEST VOICE piece is by Rafael Jesús González from California, on Veterans’ Day 2009. It is a perspective on ’supporting the troops’ …or not. I brought it here to give a small x-ray into how one family’s three generations of soldiers is evolving nearly ninety years after what was supposed to have been ‘the war to end all wars, World War One’ …GUEST VOICE...

“Having a ham sandwich on the afternoon of Yom Kippur doesn’t make you less Jewish,” Rabbi Yitzchak Schochet, chairman of the Rabbinical Council of the United Synagogue, said recently. I feel like this may be a license for mis-behavior. (If you’re interested in the context of Rabbi Schochet’s remark, click here.) Cross-posted at Conventional Folly

Anti-abortion and pro-life advocates successfully added an Amendment to the House Health Reform Bill that prohibited any Federal Funds from subsidizing private insurance purchases by individuals and families on public exchanges that would cover abortions. Pro-abortion and pro-choice advocates cried foul and the amendment constituted an impermissible limit on a woman’s right to choose. The President also...

David Brooks had me going there, with the first several paragraphs in his column today. He had me thinking a new David Brooks had suddenly emerged, as a butterfly from its chrysalis, with powers of insight and perception the old David Brooks could only dream of having.

Dear, sweet Pat Robertson. Such a gentle, kindly Christian gentleman:

Tomorrow is Veterans Day. During the past few days I have been writing about the sacrifices made by and heroism exhibited by our veterans—both living and departed. We often forget, however, that many of the sacrifices made, heroism and patriotism displayed and just plain honorable service to our country is by men and women who at one time were not even permitted to legally serve, and who today can serve...

Fourteen were killed at Fort Hood, not thirteen as reported all week long. Which official is correcting the death toll? I am. On the authority of being a mother who is multi-paragravida, meaning one who has given birth more than once, and on the authority of being a grandmother of five souls, I can, I think, count straight about this particular tragedy. Francheska Velez was a 21-year-old woman, shot to death...

The original 1787 National Convention assembled 55 delegates in Philadelphia. Over a period of four months this small group drafted the U.S. Constitution that was formally adopted by a supermajority of existing States and became effective in 1789. For most of its 220 years, it has provided the national governmental structure to create one of the most important, democratic, economically wealthy, influential,...

UPDATED: House Democrats are laying down the gauntlet on abortion rights (emphasis in original):

Formerly Democratic, now Independent, Sen. Joseph Lieberman formally and officially confirmed to Chris Wallace this morning that his conscience requires him to vote no on health care reform when a bill reaches the Senate floor kill health care reform by joining a Republican filibuster to prevent the Senate’s health care reform bill from ever getting to the floor for a vote:

Yes, it’s an historic achievement: