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By David Swanson

On August 1, 2002, then-Assistant Attorney General of the United States Jay Bybee sent an 18-page official memorandum from the Office of Legal Counsel to the Acting General Counsel of the CIA John Rizzo. Such memos are treated as laws within our government, not opinions, not theories, not briefings, but laws. They are secret laws, but in many cases there’s not much risk of us ordinary schmucks who don’t know the laws violating them, at least not without also violating read more

By David Swanson

If you missed Tuesday’s press conference at the White House, press secretary Robert Gibbs got himself into some trouble, and it all started with those two little syllables:

“Helen.”

Upon which Helen Thomas one again abandoned propriety and asked an actual question:

“Why is the President blocking habeas corpus from prisoners at Bagram? I thought he taught constitutional law. And these prisoners have been there –“

Here’s where Gibbs stepped in read more

UPDATE: Someone pointed out to me that the cartoon does not necessarily show deficits going down, so this is a better first paragraph than the original below:

You ran a cartoon on Tax Day April 15th depicting former president Ronald Reagan reducing spending by reducing taxes and President Obama increasing taxes by increasing spending. The latter might prove true, but is a prediction, and thus far Obama has proposed lowering taxes for 95 percent of us. The former is simply not true. Reagan cut read more