"And it’s really quite fantastic that Gates and Mullen, Gates being the former head of the CIA during Iran-Contra and the overseer of Iraq and Afghanistan, and Mullen being the military commander for Iraq and Afghanistan—I’m not sure what his further background is—who have ordered assassinations every day, are trying to bring people on board to look at a speculative understanding of whether we might have blood on our hands. These two men arguably are wading in the blood from those wars. According to the statistics we pulled out of the Afghan War Diary, those reports covering six years, we see in the internal reporting itself, just of the regular US Army and not the top-secret operations, that 20,000 people have been killed. And similarly, we know from Iraq Body Count that there’s 108,000 people, where there’s media reports and other evidence to show, that have died in Iraq. The hypocrisy in these statements is extraordinary."

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner took up the role of political attack dog Wednesday, lambasting Republican tax policies as a "700 billion dollar fiscal mistake." In a rare partisan jab, Geithner assailed Republicans for backing tax cuts for "the top two percent" of US earners, a policy he said would punch a hole in government budgets for the next decade.

Congressman Mike Rogers, who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, told a Michigan radio station that he thinks Pfc. Bradley Manning, if found guilty of giving classified military videos and documents to Wikileaks, should be executed for treason.

The three studies on climate geoengineering combine to paint a bleak picture of unintended consequences, fundamental tradeoffs, side effects, and major problems even after all CO2 emissions cease.

Good news on the oil spill front! Not only is BP's "static kill" tactic apparently working, there's a new report from the U.S. government saying that the oil in the Gulf of Mexico "poses only a slight risk." Huzzah! According to the report, published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, only 26 percent of the 4.9 million barrels of oil released by the ruptured well is still at sea or on shore "in a form that could... cause problems." That's only, like, 1.2 million barrels of oil, which is so little the fish probably don't even notice it. And get this: Only "thousands" of birds and other animals died, a "relatively modest toll." And, when you think about it, aren't there too many birds anyway?

It was the third big defeat for Democrats on the environment in weeks after Reid was forced to abandon a climate change bill, and then even a modest plan to promote the spread of alternative energy sources. America's failure to address climate change has raised concerns that even the flimsy deal on global warming reached at Copenhagen could now be in jeopardy. "The Senate's failure to act on either climate or the immediate needs of Gulf coast communities shows just how tight a stranglehold Big Oil has on Congress," said Peter Lehner, director of the Natural Resources Defence Council. "Congress has failed to protect the Gulf."

U.S. moratorium on deep-water oil and gas drilling may end sooner than Nov. 30 if evidence from hearings that start this week support lifting the ban, Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Director Michael Bromwich said. Bromwich said he’ll confer with Interior Secretary Ken Salazar “in real time” about his findings during meetings with industry officials, academic experts and environmentalists beginning tomorrow in New Orleans and continuing next week in Mobile, Alabama, and Pensacola, Florida. “We may be able to cut short the moratorium before November 20 if that’s what the facts support,” Browmwich told reporters today at a briefing in Washington. “It’s everybody’s hope that the moratorium can be lifted.” The Interior Department revised the drilling ban July 12 after a court invalidated the six-month moratorium imposed following the BP Plc oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. At the time Salazar announced the policy, he said he would consider modifications based on new information. A primary reason for the original ban was that the response to the BP spill was tying up almost all of the oil industry’s equipment that would be used to contain and clean up an accident, Bromwich told reporters. (Any bets on whether the moratorium will be lifted early? Any takers?)

"Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker made his ruling Wednesday in a lawsuit filed by two gay couples who claimed the voter-approved ban violated their civil rights. A copy of the ruling had not yet been publicly released."

A person close to the case says a federal judge has overturned California's same-sex marriage ban in a landmark case that could eventually land before the U.S. Supreme Court. Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker made his ruling Wednesday in a lawsuit filed by two gay couples who claimed the voter-approved ban violated their civil rights.

The Senate overcame GOP obstruction to approve a bill that provides economic aid to struggling state governments in order to preserve jobs nationwide. With a clear win in hand, Majority Leader Harry Reid slammed the 38 Republicans who voted against the measure.

Republicans have surely earned their title as the party of No. They are against everything Democrats try to pass, even if they were for it only last week. Their hypocrisy and willingness to throw the American people under the bus is both unprecedented and despicable.

Republicans who so righteously wave The Constitution around are now on a mission to tear it up. Not the whole thing mind you, just the parts they don't like. At the top of that list is the 14th Amendment. You know, THAT ONE that gives everyone born here "equal protection" under the law. That includes African Americans, Hispanics, Moslems, gays, Democrats and anyone with a funny sounding name.

Fresh from admitting that mistakes were made in its broadcasting of Andrew Breitbart's deceptively edited, race-baiting video of Shirley Sherrod's speech, Fox News host Greta Van Susteren rushed to her blog recently to apologize because a producer on her show ran footage of Shirley Sherrod as "B roll" for a story on Rep. Maxine Waters. Obviously, to Fox News segment producers, all African Americans look alike — even women, one of whom has been all over the news lately and the other who has served in Congress for 20 years.

Where are they now? Last winter, when record snowstorms brought life in the northeast corridor to a halt, Virginia Republicans launched a web ad, “12 inches of global warming,” and the family of Oklahoma senator and global warming “skeptic” Jim Inhofe built an igloo on the national mall, labeling it “Al Gore’s new home.” Now, as Xtreme weather has been setting new records for pure swelter along that same corridor (and pure drench in the Midwest), who’s building a sweat lodge on the Mall labeled “Jim Inhofe’s new home”? Where are the mocking Democratic web ads? Has the president said a word? In fact, amid temperatures that hit 105 degrees and above in the East, has anyone said a word? Do you realize just how rare are the stories in major papers or on the TV news that even suggest heavily covered weird weather in our nation and elsewhere could in any way be linked to global warming in a year that may break world warmth records?

It's not hard to figure out why the allegations against Maxine Waters seem bogus. You simply need to read the 80-page House Ethics Report carefully. In order to concoct a case against her, the authors of the report twisted the meaning of the House Ethics rules and embellished the underlying facts. The report was first published one year ago, but is now being released shortly before the 2010 campaign season. The timing alone makes you wonder.

There's a chain e-mail going around wondering why EVERY sheriff can't be more like Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County. It makes for great reading - fiction category. Here's a definitive and comprehensive look at the facts and the myths surrounding the disastrous tenure of Sheriff Joe.

Two governors joined Senate Democrats to pressure Republicans to allow a vote on a bill that would provide continued federal aid to state governments in an effort to keep the nation's economic recovery moving.

Seventeen months after President Barack Obama pledged to withdraw all combat brigades from Iraq by Sep. 1, 2010, he quietly abandoned that pledge Monday, admitting implicitly that such combat brigades would remain until the end of 2011.

Here’s the bottom line on Pakistan’s "duplicity." After 9/11, the U.S. threatened to "bomb Pakistan back to the Stone Age" unless it turned against the Taliban, a religious, anti-Communist movement, and opened Pakistan to U.S. military forces and intelligence operations. This was told to me by a former head of ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence service whose directors I have known since 1985. Former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf says his nation was forced to reluctantly give in to intense U.S. pressure and abandon the Taliban, which served as Pakistan’s proxy army in Afghanistan battling the still active Afghan Communist Party — Tajik Northern Alliance, also backed by Russia and Iran. Intensifying efforts by India to extend its influence into Afghanistan deeply worry Pakistan. Pakistan was forced by the U.S. to act against its own vital strategic interests. Southern Afghanistan has long been Pakistan’s sphere of influence. This column revealed that in 2007, Pakistan and India concluded that the U.S. and its dragooned allies would be defeated and driven from Afghanistan. Both old foes began implementing a proxy war to control strategic Afghanistan. Pakistan was compelled to follow a dual-track policy: Accepting semi-occupation by the U.S. and $1 billion annually from Washington and paying lip service to the U.S.-led war, while keeping open links to Taliban and tribal militants.

It's rather amazing that the Federal Government asserts the right to require U.S. citizens and American lawyers to obtain government permission before entering into an attorney-client relationship -- all because these officials decided on their own, with no process, to call the citizen a "Global Terrorist." It's difficult to imagine a more blatantly unconstitutional power than that. What kind of an American would think the Government has the power to decide whether citizens may or may not be represented by lawyers? Then again, this is an administration that asserts the power to choose American citizens for targeted killings far from any battlefield with no due process of any kind -- and plenty of its supporters are perfectly content with this -- so nothing should really be surprising.