Author: Andrew Sullivan

Presumably, that's Ahmadinejad's response to Bush's "Axis Of Evil". He needs a Frum or two. Scott Adams is amused:

I laughed when I saw this New York Times article in which Iran's state run media referred to America as part of the "triangle of wickedness." Apparently the triangle includes America, Israel, and Miscellaneous.

I will allow that there are some translation issues here. Triangle of wickedness probably sounds way more awesome in Farsi. But it does make me wonder what phrases they considered before they landed on the Triangle of Wickedness.

One clue is that they had to add a miscellaneous category just to get the threat level up to triangle. Otherwise the labeling options are limited to Duo of Duplicity, or the Gruesome Twosome, or the Twin Terribles. See? It's harder than you think.

Remember when Fox News called Michelle Obama a "baby mama"? It appears Scott Brown implied the same regarding Barack's mother:

Chait reacts with disgust:

By showing Brown endorsing a fringe right-wing pet theory (explanation here), it's more evidence of the fact that Brown is anything but the good government, uniter-not-a-divider moderate he pretends to be. That's the fundamental lie of his campaign that Coakley has been seeking (unsuccessfully, thus far) to expose. And on a visceral level, to watch him chortling as he calls Obama illegitimate is just gross and offensive. To me it exposes the man far more deeply than Coakley not knowing who Curt Schilling is.

A longer clip of the segment reveals the context of the remarks to be the unplanned pregnancy of Bristol Palin. Perhaps Brown actually meant, "Well I don't know how relevant Obama's mother's marital status is to the point at hand," but it sure looked unseemly. Watch it and make up your own mind.

"[I]f you know that it takes eight years for George Bush and his cronies to put our country into this hole … then you know we have a lot of digging to do, but some work needs to be done and this president's in the process of doing it and we need to get Marcia Coakley to help him to do that," Congressman Patrick Kennedy (D-RI), who went on to call Martha Coakley "Marcia" repeatedly.

Rafaela, Argentina, 12 pm

I recommend Chait who recommends Cohn:

Democrats from both ideological sides ought to consider whether voting against it now really spares them political blow-back. All of them have already voted for a health care bill. And that means they can expect one of the following two advertisements this fall: Candidate X is an out-of-touch liberal who voted for the horrible health care reform bill that passed.

Candidate X is an out-of-touch liberal who voted for the horrible health care reform bill that almost passed.

It seems to me the two ads would be equally effective, unless Democrats can counter it by touting the benefits of reform–by reminding voters that, in the future, they won’t have to worry that insurance will run out when they get sick, that they’ll be able to have a binding appeal when insurers deny coverage, that they’ll be guaranteed emergency room coverage without prior approval, that they’ll be able to change jobs worrying about losing insurance, and so on.

But the only way to make that argument is to pass health care reform. No matter what happens on Tuesday.

That's Joe Klein's read of the election in Massachusetts:

At the end of his presidency, Bill Clinton told me that he should have enacted welfare reform before trying health care. He needed to establish credibility as a good manager–at that point, most middle class voters considered the welfare system a worthless scam (and it was, as subsequent events showed, in desperate need of reform). Obama probably needed to do something similar…and he will, belatedly, do so this year, pushing for stricter financial regulations and a tax on big banks to recoup the bailouts…

He chose instead to take on health care reform, a project of indisputable long-term value to the country. He has gotten farther than most experts considered possible. He has made embarrassing compromises in the process, but it's likely he couldn't have gotten to this point any other way. He has spent most of his political capital. And, if the Democrats lose the election in Massachusetts, Obama loses his veto-proof majority in the Senate … and if he does, his gamble will, most likely, have failed.

The thing missing in this equation is that Obama did indeed tackle as best anyone could the economic crisis. But total opposition from the GOP and the usual foot-dragging by the Dems made health insurance reform a dominant issue and the sheer size of the problem allowed the nihilist right to promote the lie that this was all he was interested in.

But if there's one thing the nihilist right understands it is the power of a good lie. And if you lose your health insurance in the next few years, or you were hoping to be able to get some soon, or if you just lost your job and thereby insurance, or if your premiums continue to sky-rocket and your wages continue to languish because of health care costs, you know who to blame. 

He tried. The system killed it.

(Hat tip: Smith)

One of the key figures in the alleged cover-up of a torture session gone wrong – "If the prisoner dies, you're doing it wrong" – responds to the Harper's Magazine piece:

On Monday, in response to the article, Army Col. Michael Bumgarner said in an email that "this blatant misrepresentation of the truth infuriates me." Bumgarner said that Hickman "is only trying to be a spotlight ranger; he knows nothing about what transpired in Camp 1 or our medical facility. I do, I was there." Camp 1 is the facility where the three detainees were ordinarily held.

Bumgarner added that he would have to get clearance before he can talk to the news media, "but rest assured, I do want to talk to you very badly and set the record straight."

Here's what Scott Horton's article notes about Bumgarner's response to the sudden, simultaneous deaths of three inmates:

According to independent interviews with soldiers who witnessed the speech, Bumgarner told his audience that “you all know” three prisoners in the Alpha Block at Camp 1 committed suicide during the night by swallowing rags, causing them to choke to death. This was a surprise to no one—even servicemen who had not worked the night before had heard about the rags. But then Bumgarner told those assembled that the media would report something different. It would report that the three prisoners had committed suicide by hanging themselves in their cells. It was important, he said, that servicemen make no comments or suggestions that in any way undermined the official report. He reminded the soldiers and sailors that their phone and email communications were being monitored. The meeting lasted no more than twenty minutes.

This is the isolated part of Gitmo where paddy wagons came and went, whence screams could be heard during "aggressive questioning", and whence three corpses are believed to have emerged after the kind of treatment once reserved for totalitarian states but now indelibly part of the American way.

No, this is not a satellite of a secret Iran torture chamber; it is not a Soviet camp; it is not an isolated black site in North Korea. It is in Gitmo. And it is where America's founding principles came to die.

The corpses were delivered to their families with their necks cut out, to make it impossible to tell whether they were strangled to death in a session engineered by Cheney and Rumsfeld or whether they hanged themselves simultaneously as the cover-up insisted.

A closer-up version of the same photograph below the fold: