Emptywheel recently wrote a post about a debate where Candidate Fred Johnson taking Bill Huizenga to task about his support for Blackwater Security/Xe. An excellent post…and it bears emphasizing that the ties between Hoekstra-clone Huizenga and Blackwater Erik Prince run very, very deep.

If Huizenga replaces retiring Pete Hoekstra, we’ll have a staunch, long time ally and bosom buddy for Erik Prince calling the shots in DC — Add in the thousands in campaign contributions from the American Bankers Association AND the Family Research Council and we have one of the most conservative, fundamentalist people setting up shop in congress with relatively little fanfare. As the Dems mock the goofy and scary O’Donnell for her extreme ways, Huizenga is sitting below the radar.

The firms that pushed securitization the hardest decided to treat mortgage record keeping into a game of Three Card Monte. Now that even they can’t find the queen, they deserve to suffer the consequences.

Cross posted from Pruning Shears.

The Yes Men are so pleased with their punking of Chevron’s greenwashing ad campaign that they’re outsourcing the folow-up. More mockery is on the way, and Chevron doesn’t like it.

The New York Times tells how a U.S. soldier intervened to stop the torture of an Iraqi prisoner by Iraqi police. Except that never happened, and the New York Times own document proves it. Why does the Times feel it has to lighten this tragic tale? Because the truth is so awful: the U.S. countenanced wide-scale torture by its puppet government, and still does.

A truly beautiful concept occurred to Antoni Gaudi. He originated a housing project. It now is Guell Park. If all of us could live in such an atmosphere, no doubt the world would be a much better place.

A quick synopsis on the Wikileaks dump…!

But really, for every bad teacher, I’ve had a good one. A teacher who gave me faith in the human race. A teacher that would listen to me. A teacher who gave me friendship. Now that friendship comes with a jail sentence.

This is the third part of a series of posts giving recommendations on California’s propositions. This post recommends a “no” vote on Proposition 22, which restricts state borrowing from local funds.

Proposition 24 (and not 23, which everybody has already heard about) will be the subject of the next post in this series.

Sen. Jim DeMint, the conservative and increasingly powerful Republican senator from South Carolina, introduced a bill Friday to strip federal funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) in the wake of National Public Radio’s decision to fire Juan Williams for comments about Muslims that he made on Fox News earlier this week.

Yes I would. No single decision has ever been more damaging