Twenty three-year-old computer programmer David House is the only person besides Bradley Manning’s aunt and attorney to visit him in prison, as Manning almost enters his sixth month in extreme isolation while awaiting trial at Quantico Marine Base.

House appeared on the Dylan Ratigan Show today to discuss his Firedoglake story about Manning’s detention, revealing new information about Bradley’s health, the Pentagon’s deceptions, and the weak accusations hurled at Manning by Adrian Lamo, the one man whose story the government used to arrest and detain Bradley.

The only evidence to emerge so far against Bradley Manning comes from Adrian Lamo, a hacker who was in a mental institution three weeks before he says Manning contacted him. Charlie Savage reports in the New York Times that Lamo has miraculously “remembered” new evidence from his chat logs that connects Bradley Manning and Julian Assange. But instead of asking Lamo to go back to Wired, or the Washington Post, and get copies of the chat transcripts he gave them, the New York Times says “no problem, we’ll just publish this based on the recollections of someone who was in a mental institution two weeks before all this happened.”

It is with great joy that I note the Senate passage and today’s signing by President Obama of a bill that should lead to the eventual repeal of “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” The policy was pure discrimination, and has no place in a fair and equal society. But the events of the last few days [...]

The new expensive backscatter x-ray scanners installed at airports are fairly worthless because they can’t stop a determined individual from smuggling contraband onto an airplane in a body cavity. But that’s not all; it appears the scanners can easily be defeated by a kitchen rolling pin and a roll of tape.

Jon Stewart got the ball rolling, and now even Shepard Smith is so disgusted by GOP obstructionism on the 9/11 health care bill that he read a list of the names of Republican senators who would not appear on Fox News to speak on the issue.  DeMint, McConnell, Graham, Hatch, McCain… nobody wants to appear [...]

Liberals need to stop reverting to a weird tribal defense of President Obama and his actions. They should be pushing for much better reform, not defending the current health care reform legislation. Defending bad policies which are fundamentally conservative using factually incorrect arguments undermines liberal ideology.

In hindsight, it is truly amazing how far Obama moved the Overton window to the right on health care reform. In appeals to fellow liberals, liberals are now arguing that the current health care reform legislation” is the only way to protect the large private health insurance companies,” as if this were a great accomplishment.

Either Sen. Mitch McConnell is a dramatically better negotiator than President Obama or Obama lied about not wanting to extend the tax cuts for the wealthy. McConnell’s superior skills of negotiation appear even more impressive given that he only controls a small minority in the Senate.

If, as Robert Kuttner says, Obama is negotiating a a “grand bargain” with the Republicans that includes cuts to Social Security benefits, the GOP is running a successful trap for him once again. White House strategist apparently believe that this will “give Obama ‘credit’ for getting serious about deficit reduction.’”

The beginning of the 20th century saw Populists, Progressives, and citizen reformers using the three main forms of large scale direct democracy — recalls, ballot initiatives and referendums — to address systematic problems with the status quo power structure in this country and expand political accountability. After World War II, the use of citizen initiatives [...]

As of Thursday, it was unlikely that either the DREAM Act or DADT was going to come up for a vote in the Senate in this session. Talking Points Memo was reporting that the White House was “stalling the DADT vote” by insisting that the START nuclear reduction treaty have priority, which meant that there [...]