Today the Bush administration suffered its fourth major defeat since June in litigation over detentions at Guantanamo. This ruling by US District Judge Richard Leon, a Bush appointee, is the most devastating yet. He'd been expected to favor the government, not least because in 2005 Leon had ruled that the detainees have no habeas rights. And these are not low-profile prisoners. In his 2002 State of the Union address, George Bush had accused them of planning to bomb the US embassy building in Sarajevo. (As with other such garish accusations, the Bush administration subsequently and very quietly changed its allegations to something considerably more mundane – planning to fight in Afghanistan.)

Yet Leon rejected the administration's argument that five Algerian nationals formerly resident in Bosnia are enemy combatants and ordered their release "forthwith".

Health insurers have announced that they'll support a new requirement that they must accept all applicants, including those who are ill or disabled, as long as everybody is required to purchase health insurance. In other words, while acknowledging the intense public pressure for real health care reform, they're advancing a scheme to insure universal employment for health insurers.

The insurers do not however support a flat rate for both healthy and sick applicants - without which their apparent concession really is just another ploy coming out of the industry's bottomless bag of tricks.

So, you might think, who better to carry water for agriculture on the Obama transition team than a George Washington University Research Professor in the Department of Health Policy? Someone with past appointments at USDA and the FDA? Someone with think tank experience.

Oh, yes, and someone who was Vice President for Public Policy at Monsanto Corporation.

How many have waited for how long to read that headline.

There's truth in the old saying that bad coinage chases out the good. When mediocre coinage gets passed off so easily that it becomes current, all the rest becomes debased down to a level with the worst. Very quickly people attach no particular value to what ought to be the more authentic specie.

Historical writings are subject to similar forces. What turns out to be popular and widely accepted very often is nearly the flimsiest stuff around. If they're not actually counterfeit or hollow, popular histories may have the thinnest veneer of authentic learning applied over a core of semi-useless junk. The better histories, though hoarded by specialists, get undervalued and therefore pushed aside from public discourse. Undeterred by norms of accountability, myriad hackers churn out junk history at a phenomenal rate and thus pull the market standard down to their level.

So I wish good luck to Matthew Pinsker as he attempts to reverse the sudden devaluation of the histories of Abraham Lincoln's administration.

On October 18, 2008, unbossed reviewed congressional testimony on corruption in Iraq that reaches well into the al-Maliki government and has meant that billions of US dollars has been lost.

Yesterday the New York Times report in Premier of Iraq Is Quietly Firing Fraud Monitors reported on events related to the testimony at that hearing.

Historians and political scientists argue endlessly about the merits of their disciplines. Each side claims to be empirically-based while challenging the usefulness of the other's methods and approaches. But the difference between political science and history can be summed it more easily, it seems. Historians recognize the futility of playing with counter-factual history.

At the New Republic political scientist David W. Rohde (not the Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter at the NYT) would have us believe that John Kerry's defeat in 2004 was "the luckiest break" the Democrats have caught in more than 40 years. Had the Democrats not lost that election, Rohde claims, they would have been dragged under by the quagmire of the succeeding four years. It's as if Democrats have no real ability to chart a new course.

To find a vocal critic of the Bush administration's torture regime stumbling around while discussing its components is a little disconcerting. It confirms what I've long suspected - that even as bits of the torture program have been exposed little by little, the Bush administration managed never the less to sow confusion over those revelations. People really need to sort this out before the Obama administration comes to grip with its predecessor's vile record.

Either Barack Obama will show strength by adopting the core of Bush's policy regarding the prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay and continue to detain them without trial, or the next president will give in to political pressure from crazy civil libertarians, release known terrorists and endanger the US.

That's the message of much of the commentary on Gitmo churned out in the traditional media since the election, including this NYT report by William Glaberson. It has relied not so much on the staunchest critics of Bush's detention and torture policies – no surprise that - but instead on Washington establishment types with axes to grind or interests to protect. Their notion is that, while Obama remains most malleable, he needs to be gulled into thinking that the central issues concern political leadership and the need to protect America from dangerous terrorists.

They don't. The central issue is whether to restore the rule of law. Much to their regret, that's not a very complicated issue.

So who would be about the worst person the Obama administration could be talking to about heading the U.S. Department of Agriculture? Besides the CEO of Monsanto? How about PA Secretary of Agriculture Dennis Wolff? The Dennis Wolff otherwise known as the Monsanto shill who approved a stealth milk labeling ban last year to help out his buddies at Monsanto?

"Couldn’t be!" You say? Think again!!

The ways some folks talk you would think that the National Labor Relations Board was headed by Satan and that the National Labor Relations Act was written by satanic hordes out to destroy workers. So let's see what this spawn of the damned was up to this past fiscal year. Then you can decide: Spawn of Satan or Agency trying to do its job of protecting worker rights to organize and bargain collectively?

Sarah Palin today:

Speaking at her first formal news conference before the national media since the GOP presidential ticket lost last week, the former vice presidential nominee argued that her fellow Republican governors "don't let obsessive, extreme partisanship ... get in the way of doing what's right."

Senate Democrats may have decided finally that Joe Lieberman (CT - Connecticut-for-Lieberman), who still caucuses with Democrats, needs to pay a heavy penalty. There's organized opposition however to taking away Lieberman's highly coveted chairmanship of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

“The message here is that we don’t want to start off a new era with retribution.”

We tend to think of AARP as representing the interests of retirees, though they start their recruitment campaigns when you are in your 50s. If anything should have disabused us of their role with regard to retirees it was their support for the very expensive and very flawed Medicare Part D program that saw many people with higher costs and far less coverage than they had been led to believe.

Now, the AARP is the subject of an investigation into other practices harmful to the well being of our older citizens.

Yes, despite all evidence to the contrary, according to our Prez and Wall Street Insiders, the answer to the current recession is to get rid of those pesky regulations that have prevented us from having full freedom of the market. The drums are beating to continue on with the Bush Free Market agenda. The Administration continues to make stealth changes via hidden and recondite regulations.