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ProgressVirginia reported Tuesday afternoon that the Virginia Senate’s Privileges and Elections Committee killed Sen. Charles “Bill” Carrico Sr.’s electoral college-rigging bill, despite an offer by Carrico to amend the bill to award electors in proportion to the state’s popular vote. The vote was 11-4 against the bill, although it will not be official until the close of the committee meeting.

The budgie parakeet Disco is quite a talker (yes, he's for real) and gives Mick Jagger a run for his money! h/t nyckname. Open thread below...

Genre: AlternativeTitle: RecoveryArtist: Frank Turner Tape Deck Heart [Explicit]

Frank Turner is the former lead singer for the British punk band Millions Dead. The single from his new album is both sad and dance-able -- a nice combination.

Whatcha listening to this evening?

Oh Thank God--Finally, War With Syria
by Russ Baker on Jun 15, 2013
As we have been reporting over the past 18 months, the Obama Administration has had a very frustrating time inventing reasons to invade Syria or otherwise topple the independent-minded Assad regime. It seemed Bush-style “Curveball” inventions were out of vogue. But good news: they’re back, under a Democrat. And the real motivations—why, those are none of your business.

Why Obama Cannot Undo The Surveillance Society--But We Can
by Russ Baker on Jun 11, 2013
When a country is truly run by a handful, how can they ever let up on surveillance? They can’t, and won’t. But we can make them do it. However, not if we wait for instructions from the establishment.

FBI: Knew About Saudi 9/11 Hijacker Ties--But Lied To Protect "National Security"
by Russ Baker on Jun 5, 2013
In new court filings, the FBI has tacitly admitted that it knows about ties between members of the Saudi royal family and 9/11 hijackers, that it lied about not knowing, and that no one should learn more about this -- for reasons of “national security.”

Philadelphia public schools are the victim of a weird and evil set of priorities. In this interview, Philadelphia Mayor Nutter attempts to explain why public schools are being closed due to state cuts at the same time the state has found $400 million to build yet another prison.

Nutter argued that Philadelphia’s school system would not suffer from the closures because of the expansion of charter schools in the city, which he insisted were still public schools. He dismissed the argument that charter schools have often been criticized for their lack of accountability, and added, “My job is to make sure we have a system of great schools all across the city of Philadelphia…and that the election officials are providing the proper funding for a high-quality education regardless of what school a parent decides to send their child to.”

About those charter schools, Mayor Nutter...Let's talk about one charter operator in particular -- ASPIRA. The ASPIRA network boasts of building Latino leaders for the future. It is a charter school network which claims to reduce gang affiliation and dropout rates, while encouraging students to serve their communities. These are admirable goals, particularly for a charter school operator which is public, more or less.

ASPIRA runs one high school in Philadelphia. The teachers in that school are trying to organize and join the American Federation of Teachers. This is partly in order to do battle with those who think closing schools and building prisons is a good thing. It is also because there should be a counterweight to the corporate-think endemic in charter schools. If education is the goal of ASPIRA and other charter operators, allowing teachers to organize should not be a problem, right?

Wrong. ASPIRA, a non-profit organization, has committed $400,000 to fight back against any effort on the part of teachers to organize in the schools they manage. In a climate where schools in Philadelphia are closing on a daily basis, a not-for-profit charter school operator is committing nearly half a million dollars? That raises a couple of key questions for me. Who is funding that battle on behalf of ASPIRA and why aren't they spending those funds on educating children?

Teachers aren't bending under the threat. You can help them by signing the petition at MoveOn.org. Here is their statement:

A teacher’s working conditions are a student’s learning conditions. In order to make improvements in schools, teachers must be free to speak out, to advocate for their students, and to work together to ensure an environment that promotes learning. All school staff and students deserve security and consistency.

That's why staff at Olney Charter High School have come together to form a union. The dedicated Olney staff are committed to building a strong voice to advocate for important improvements for themselves and their students. It is shameful that ASPIRA, which receives public tax dollars, has decided to spend education resources on anti-union lawyers and delay tactics. Join us now in telling ASPIRA to stop spending education dollars to interfere with staff's right to form a union, and start working with staff to create the best possible education for students.

Schools, not prisons. Books, not union-busting. This is not rocket science. It's sound social policy.

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Three former NSA whistle-blowers discuss the Edward Snowden case with USA TODAY reporters Susan Page and Peter Eisler.

Edward Snowden is apparently feeling safe enough in Hong Kong to field questions at The Guardian in a live Q&A. In his first answer, Snowden defended his decision to leak information about NSA operations against China and other countries by saying he didn’t reveal any operations against “legitimate military targets,” only civilian infrastructure like universities and businesses. Snowden said that hacking countries we’re not at war with could crash critical systems, affecting “millions of innocent people.” As for why he chose Hong Kong, he said he could have been interdicted on his way to Iceland and that it would take longer for the U.S. to pressure Hong Kong into extraditing him. Snowden also said that more information on exactly what sort of access the NSA has to tech company servers—he said it was “direct,” but companies and the NSA say it’s more targeted.

Of former Vice President Dick Cheney calling him a "traitor" on national television, Snowden commented that "Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American..."

From the Q&A, Snowden was asked:

Kimberly Dozier @KimberlyDozier

US officials say terrorists already altering TTPs because of your leaks, & calling you traitor. Respond? http://www.guardiannews.com #AskSnowden
10:34 AM - 17 Jun 2013

His response:

US officials say this every time there's a public discussion that could limit their authority. US officials also provide misleading or directly false assertions about the value of these programs, as they did just recently with the Zazi case, which court documents clearly show was not unveiled by PRISM.

Journalists should ask a specific question: since these programs began operation shortly after September 11th, how many terrorist attacks were prevented SOLELY by information derived from this suspicionless surveillance that could not be gained via any other source? Then ask how many individual communications were ingested to acheive that, and ask yourself if it was worth it. Bathtub falls and police officers kill more Americans than terrorism, yet we've been asked to sacrifice our most sacred rights for fear of falling victim to it.

Further, it's important to bear in mind I'm being called a traitor by men like former Vice President Dick Cheney. This is a man who gave us the warrantless wiretapping scheme as a kind of atrocity warm-up on the way to deceitfully engineering a conflict that has killed over 4,400 and maimed nearly 32,000 Americans, as well as leaving over 100,000 Iraqis dead. Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American, and the more panicked talk we hear from people like him, Feinstein, and King, the better off we all are. If they had taught a class on how to be the kind of citizen Dick Cheney worries about, I would have finished high school.

Three former NSA officials who tried to bring the immense data-collecting activities of their agency to light say Edward Snowden did the right thing by making the operation public. In a round-table interview with USA Today (See video above), Thomas Drake, William Binney, and J. Kirk Wiebe praised Snowden for exposing information in the public's interest. The trio pushed back on the idea that his actions caused grave harm to the country, saying people including terrorists know the government is monitoring their telecommunications.

My new op-ed at Al Jazeera English, "Obama's crackpot realism and the real crime of Edward Snowden" argues that C. Wright Mill's concept of 'crackpot realism' helps explain and define Obama's continuity with George Bush's policies. The op-ed starts like this:

On June 8, Juan Cole, one of the few true Middle East experts in the US, posted a short entry on his Informed Comment blog. The title said it all: "We misunderstood Barack: He only wanted the domestic surveillance to be made legal, not to end it".

But domestic surveillance was far from the only Bush policy that Obama has wanted to continue, despite giving supporters the opposite impression. The continued - if reduced - use of indefinite detention is one example, the continued - vastly expanded - use of drones is another, and underlying them all is the continued self-defeating policy of fighting a global "war on terrorism" - but debranding it, because the term "war on terror" has become toxic, and renaming it makes it harder to oppose.

Foreign policy is not the only area in which Obama has turned out to be far more conservative than his 2008 campaign supporters had reason to believe, and there's surely a variety of different factors involved. But in the overlapping realms of foreign policy and national security highlighted by the revelations of Edward Snowden, one factor in particular deserves our attention: what the radical sociologist C. Wright Mills described over half a century ago as "crackpot realism".

In his 1956 book, The Power Elite, Mills wrote: "For the first time in American history, men in authority are talking about an 'emergency' without a foreseeable end... such men as these are crackpot realists: in the name of realism they have constructed a paranoid reality all their own."

Read the whole op-ed here.

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Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) announced on Monday that she was writing a book filled with "legalese" about how to fight what some social conservatives call the "War on Christmas."

In her first appearance on Fox News after once again becoming an employee of the network, Palin was asked by Fox News host Megyn Kelly to fill in the audience about how she had been spending her time.

"I'm doing great," the former Alaska governor explained. "I'm very busy of course with my kids -- two beautiful grandkids -- writing a book, a book about Christmas and pushing back on the politically correct who would try to take Christ out of Christmas."

"We talk a lot about that in the book," she continued. "Kind of a legalese how-to push back and protect the heart of Christmas. At the same time, a very festive and happy and jolly book about tradition and recipes and fun things about Christmas."

Kelly wondered with all the time she was spending on her book, was Palin able to keep up with the recent scandals involving Benghazi, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and National Security Agency surveillance?

"It's the whole ball of wax that all leads to this revelation that government lies," Palin opined. "And with Benghazi though, government lied and people died. So, that's very significant. The other issues are government lied and government spied. That's pretty bad too."

"It's a foundational message of the tea party grassroots movement, and that is that government is out of hand, it is oppressive, it is intrusive into every aspect our lives. And it's grown so large that it is unaccountable this point."

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H/t Heather for this video.

As the case of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden moves forward in the press, the conventional wisdom of the media elites seems to be that Snowden is bizarre, a coward,a weasel, a traitor, and a Chinese spy, to name a few -- with little or no support for the service he provided to the American people. New information is coming out from Snowden, some of which you may disagree with, but that shouldn't define the story at hand or detract from its importance.

The stupidity surrounding some of the responses given to attack him has been beyond the pale. Jeffrey Toobin said that Snowden should have just gone to his bosses to complain about the program if he was unhappy. Riiiiight! They would have immediately promoted him and then held a press conference. Sticking up for Edward Snowden was New York Times national security journalist James Risen, who has broken some very big stories in the past and who knows the value of whistleblowers to our society.

DAVID GREGORY: And I should point out, your reporting going back into the last decade was instrumental in revealing a lot of these programs at the very start during the Bush years.

JAMES RISEN: There's some limited evidence of abuse. It's been anecdotal and there's never been a thorough investigation inside the government of that. One of the problems going back to the Bush administration was all of this was kept so secret, even after we began to report about it, that the inspectors general and the internal investigations were kept secret.

So there's never been a full public accounting of the level of abuse, the level of-- there's virtually no transparency at all about how much of this really has caught up American citizens. And I think that's really one of the issues here is you've got the creation of a modern surveillance infrastructure with no debate publicly except on a ad hoc basis whenever someone in the press reports about it.

JAMES RISEN:The only reason we've been having these public debates, the only reason these laws have been passed, and that we're now sitting here talking about this is because of a series of whistleblowers. That the government has never wanted any of this reported, never wanted any of it disclosed.

If it was up to the government over the last ten years, this surveillance infrastructure would have grown enormously with no public debate whatsoever. And so every time we talk about how someone is a traitor for disclosing something, we have to remember the only reason we're talking about it is because of it.

The importance of this statement by Risen seems to be lost on most of the pundits commenting in support of the NSA metadata program. Snowden did the U.S. an invaluable service by disclosing these programs. Much of the discussion by Ignatius was directed at Snowden's worthiness (or lack thereof) to be an actual whistleblower.

Ignatius: So this is part of our system of laws and legal procedures. And that's what makes me nervous when-- somebody like Edward Snowden just willy-nilly throws it all up in the air for people to see.

I'm asking the question here about who's celebrated, who's not. I mean, who's a journalist? What's, you know, real journalist activity versus what David referenced before, which is we are a country where we shouldn't be comfortable with the idea of a 29-year-old disaffected contractor who is personally offended by a program, takes it upon himself to leak government secrets and compromise what the government in three branches thinks is important.

I think all whistleblowers should go to Ignatious and he decides what should be leaked. Don't you agree? And then came this segment.

JAMES RISEN: And I think one of the reasons that's happened and has repeatedly happened throughout the War on Terror is that the system, the internal system for whistleblowing, for the watchdog and oversight system is broken. There is no good way for anyone inside the government do go through the chain of command and report about something like this. They all fear retaliation, they fear prosecution.

And so most whistleblowers, the really, the only way they now have is to go to the press or to go to someone, go outside like Snowden did. He chose people in the press to go to. He picked and chose who he wanted. But the problem is people inside the system who try to go through the chain of command get retaliated against, punished, and they--

ANDREA MITCHELL:I--

JAMES RISEN:--eventually learn not to do it anymore.

ANDREA MITCHELL: Jim, I think they can go to Congress, they can go to the Intelligence Committee. They can go to--(OVERTALK)

JAMES RISEN: If you go-- if you're not in the intelligence community, if you're a low-ranking person in the intelligence community and you go to the Congress, to the Senate, or the House, you'll-- you will be going outside the normal bounds of--

The very idea that the government is using these programs under strict supervision and guidance with no malfeasance has already been smashed by James Bamford's excellent story in Wired.

In my article I quote from a former NSA intercept operator, Adrienne Kinne, who was posted at the NSA’s giant listening post in Georgia and who eavesdropped on many communications between Americans overseas and in the U.S., including personal calls between journalists and their families. But while she was in Georgia, satellites deep in space did the actual interception:

“Basically all rules were thrown out the window and they would use any excuse to justify a waiver to spy on Americans,” she said. She added, “A lot of time you could tell they were calling their families, waking them up in the middle of the night because of the time difference. And so they would be talking all quiet and soft and their family member is like half asleep and incredibly intimate, personal conversations.” Kinne protested both within NSA and then in a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee, but neither took any action.

Her allegations were confirmed by a second source I interviewed several years ago. David Murfee Faulk was also an intercept operator at NSA Georgia, but at a later date than Kinne, whom he never met. While there, a colleague told him about being instructed to begin warrantless targeting of Americans overseas calling the U.S. “The calls were all in English, they were all American, and the guy goes back to his supervisor, a warrant officer, and says, ‘Sir, these people are all Americans,’” according to Faulk. “He said, ‘No, just transcribe it, that’s an order, transcribe everything.’ . . . A lot of these people were having personal phone calls, calling their families back home, having all kinds of personal discussions, and everything just disappeared somewhere, someone’s got it.

Like Kinne, Faulk’s fellow intercept operator also complained. "After a few days he said he didn’t want to do it anymore, didn’t think it was right. And in a situation like that the officer just gets someone else to do it. So they got somebody else to do it. There is always somebody else who will do something like that. The whole agency down here, at least the way it operates in Georgia, there’s a lot of intimidation, everybody’s afraid of getting in trouble, and people just follow orders.” Like Kinne, Faulk also told his story privately to the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Jerry DeWitt is an atheist. So am I. I was more or less born and raised an atheist (Unitarians being notoriously tolerant about who they let in their doors), I am still an atheist, my cancer is highly unlikely to change that, so I will probably die an atheist. No real surprise there. On the other hand, Jerry DeWitt comes from a background about as far removed from the customary intellectual, secular and academic breeding ground for atheists as is imaginable. For twenty-five years, Brother Jerry was a Louisiana-born, hardcore Jimmy Swaggart styled tent revivalist Pentacostal evangelical preacher. As in... wow.

So I read Jerry DeWitt’s soon-to-be-published book, Hope After Faith, with great interest and am looking forward to a live blogchat this Tuesday - June 18th at 2:00pm EST - where our readership can engage in real time questions and answers with Mr DeWitt. But first, some background on Mr DeWitt and a review of his debut book.

I hope you can all join us tomorrow at 2:00 pm EST. I’m sure it’s going to be a fascinating conversation.

Jerry DeWitt preached his last sermon in April, 2011, after decades of privately questioning his beliefs. Six months later, his ‘deconversion’ became public after an on-line photo taken of himself with Richard Dawkins at a meeting of freethinkers was circulated by an irate relative. A pastor who becomes an atheist is rather frowned upon in some circles, particularly those in the deep South. His home town of DeRidder, Louisiana, proudly considers itself ‘the buckle on the Bible belt,’ and Jerry DeWitt’s personal loss of faith was seen as a public affront to many in his community. As a result, he became a pariah – friends deserted him, most of his family shunned him, his wife left him, he was kicked out of his ministry, fired from his secular job as a buildings inspector and he nearly lost his house in a bankruptcy and is still hanging on to it by a thread. He regularly receives hate mail and threats. A cautionary tale indeed for anyone who thinks walking away from their fundamentalist Christian faith is going to be easy.

But from the ashes of his religious life, he rose to become the first graduate of The Clergy Project, a safe, private on-line support group created by Richard Dawkins, Dan Barker and Daniel Dennett for former and current clergy members who had lost their belief in God. Soon after, he was appointed the Executive Director of Recovering From Religion, where he worked to help laypersons similarly disoriented by their loss of religious beliefs. He’s rapidly become a ‘celebrity’ atheist who – somewhat to my own envy – has publishers coming to him to write a book, newspapers chasing him for stories. He’s the subject of an up-coming documentary film, The Outcast of Beauregard Parish.

The same driving ambition he acknowledges in his book – from his resentment of other ministers promoted over himself to preach to congregations he longed to lead, to noticing how women were attracted to charismatic preachers and wondering if he’d married too young – are still evident today. Despite his reputation as a self-effacing nice guy who is all about tolerance and compassion, quick with smiles and hugs, I suspect DeWitt has an iron enough backbone to hold his own as well as any of the formidable Four Horsemen of atheists; Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett.

Hope After Faith is a genuine page-turner, I couldn’t put it down. Literally; I read a big chunk of it while lying on a gurney waiting my turn to be wheeled in for yet more surgery, and finished it a couple days later during chemotherapy – at a private religious hospital, ironically enough. DeWitt is definitely not anti-Christian, writing with deep affection for friends and family who are still inflexibly religious, and with an honesty about his own successes and failures, personal and professional, that is refreshing and even endearing. He’s not reticent about recalling how he became a Born-Again Christian at a Jimmy Swaggart tent revival when he was an impressionable 17-year-old, guided by a beloved school teacher... or of the pressure to prove himself a ‘true’ Pentacostal, which requires speaking in tongues.

For those of you who, like me, have had limited exposure to such religiously induced glossolalia, it can be quite an astonishing spectacle; I spent a Thanksgiving with a friend and her family who, unbeknownst to me, all belonged to a Pentacostal church. The evening was quite pleasant, until one man began praying, his eyes rolling up in his head as he babbled incoherently and fell writhing to the floor while the rest went into spasms of ecstasy, hands jerking in the air as if they’d been hooked up to electric wires... and I ignominiously fled to the refuge of the kitchen. They scared the holy crap out of me.

So these aren’t the sort of people one might assume are likely to ever renounce their faith. Which makes Jerry DeWitt’s story all that more remarkable, if – surprisingly – not unique. While DeWitt might be one of the more charismatic representatives, he's hardly the only, or even the first ex-preacher to ‘deconvert’ to atheism. I'm astonished by how many there are. Then again, maybe I shouldn’t be; my grandfather was a devout Southern Baptist, but his son lost any belief in God whatsoever by the time he was in third grade. More famously, Nate Phelps, the son of Fred Phelps of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church, not only rejected his father’s homophobic fanatical theology, but is a regular speaker at atheist events. The number of Doubting Thomases amongst those we least suspect may be far larger than they are willing – or perhaps able – to admit to being. Hopefully, Jerry DeWitt’s book will resonate with other nascent atheists searching for a way to cope in a country that has become increasingly radicalized by fundamentalist Christianity and hostile toward those with differing points of view.

DeWitt’s book is largely an autobiography, chronicling not only his internal spiritual debates but his disastrous personal and financial struggles. The majority of the book concentrates on his gradual progression from his search for a life of deep spiritual meaning and a genuine connection to God over his quarter of a century as a minister to a rather short chapter on becoming an atheist; understandable, as he’s only been an atheist for a couple of years. He began with a simple but compelling dilemma: how can a God who loves everyone condemn any of His creations to the torment of an eternal Hell?

‘If God really does love everyone why is it so difficult for God to pour out his spirit? Why doesn’t he just do it, make it come to pass [...] and save everyone and bring about a universal revival? And if God loves everyone, doesn’t he want everyone to be saved?’

When that domino fell, it started a chain reaction as he questioned fundamentalist doctrines and the mesmeric personalities, both the genuine believers and the eccentric charlatans, who expound them. When he adjusted to the idea that contradictions in the Bible meant it could not have been created by divine spirit but by flawed human beings to be read as metaphor, he then found himself in a struggle to reconcile religious beliefs with what he discovered in such books as Joseph Campbell’s seminal Hero with a Thousand Faces, Darwin’s Origin of the Species, Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. In the end, it was the spectre and nature of death itself his inquisitive intellect couldn’t reconcile with faith – he couldn’t force himself to pretend to pray for a woman’s badly injured brother fighting for his life in a hospital.

‘I struggled to pray because all of the conflicts that had existed inside me about my faith, which I’d temporarily resolved time and time again through my motivation to remain in the ministry, suddenly fused into an awareness that there was no God.’

Not only wasn’t God going to save everyone, He wasn’t going to save anyone, because God doesn’t exist.

Once the last convoluted trappings of religion fell from his shoulders, DeWitt, oddly enough, came full circle to realize what he’d been searching for all his professional life: a way to simply love humanity. He even lists himself on Facebook as a secular humanist rather than atheist.

In part, it may be because DeWitt is finding the world of atheism – like Christianity – isn’t any more unified in our opinions. Organizations such as American Atheists, dedicated to defending the civil rights of atheists and advocating for a complete separation of church and state, uphold objectives I certainly agree with, but some of the methods they employ make me uneasy. While I would like to see the old motto E Pluribus Unum reinstated on our national currency rather than In God We Trust, I’m not overly incensed by it. Most atheists truly couldn’t give a toss about the ‘War on Christmas.’ One’s beliefs, or lack thereof, is a personal and private matter; it’s when it invades public and political arenas it transmutes into something rather less benign. Even DeWitt has expressed reservations about the ‘hard side’ of atheism that regards religion as a disease or mental illness to be cured, or a foe to be fought and conquered. ‘I do struggle with the idea of being connected to people who automatically offend and turn off the other people.’

And having watched him on YouTube, I realize his delivery technique is honed by years of professional preaching; the ‘Can I get a “Darwin”?’ (a riff on the ‘can I get an amen’) is humorous the first time, but starts to grate by the tenth – I resist, even in jest, the deification of anyone, including Darwin. Perhaps especially Darwin. But when he slipped into his best Pentacostal Come To Jesus sermonising at the end of this clip, his performance is electrifying, amusing... and oddly disturbing.

He is still, by his own admission, a preacher, even if in some ways he’s traded in one form of ‘worship’ for another – that deep-rooted desire to belong to a like-minded and accepting community inherent in many Christian sects translating itself to belonging to another community that welcomes and appreciates very different beliefs. Even his description of his new-found atheism was couched in religious terms: “I felt born again; it was like a salvation that I stumbled across. I could minister to people, I could be in their lives, all without pretending I was someone who I wasn’t or pretending to know all the answers.”

That compulsion to minister has not waned for Jerry DeWitt. But atheism is not a religion. As an atheist, I find proselytising distasteful – whether it’s for Jesus or for atheism. The passionate desire for everyone to renounce religion and convert to the secular humanist tenants of reason so that we can all live in a better world is far too close to the evangelistic zeal of converting everyone to Christianity in order to save their souls from the everlasting fires of hell. To his credit, this is something DeWitt understands very well. So while he has turned his remarkable preaching talents to promoting atheism, he’s carefully balancing that skill with supporting those who are seeking answers without trying to pressure anyone to ‘convert.’ He’s doing an admirable version of Unitarian ‘proselytising’ – knocking on someone’s door then running off to let them figure it out for themselves.

‘We’re trying to have meetings, we’re trying to form organizations, we’re trying to get a message out, until the meetings and the organizations and the messages aren’t necessary anymore. We’re following in this very long and beautiful tradition of people fighting for their rights,’ DeWitt has insisted.

Fair enough, I suppose. For those folks who feel trapped in their religion – either by doubts or because of family or financial or community ties they find difficult to break – maybe this is exactly what’s needed; a sort AA for religion to help and support those who have no idea how to do it on their own. Although I’m not sure that analogy is all that constructive, either.

Many of the messages DeWitt and other atheists employ are likewise heavily borrowed. I'm a little uncomfortable with some of the language used, such as DeWitt being described as a ‘closet’ atheist who was ‘outed,’ second-hand terminology from the gay community that possibly benefits neither party. The idea that one ‘recovers’ from faith as if it’s a disease, or ‘graduates’ from religion inferring those who believe in God are somehow intellectually inferior, troubles me.

So while I’m sure there are plenty of atheists who do view religion or belief in God or even just a vague mystical ‘higher power’ as some sort of mental illness or disease, I’m not one of them. I rather doubt Jerry DeWitt is either. For some people, it’s an outlet that gives them comfort, like collecting china dolls or going to Star Trek conventions dressed as Klingons, or allows them to help their community, like fostering puppies for Guide Dogs or volunteering at the Cancer Council charity shops – as long as they're not hurting anyone, who cares? I know there are many people, including a few in my own family, who are praying for me during this illness – is my own atheism so dogmatic, am I so petty that I can’t recognise their sincere expression of love and concern? In the end, it all just boils down to three simple words:

Love One Another. As an atheist, I can embrace that. And, I dare say, so does Jerry DeWitt.

So it is a pleasure to welcome Brother Jerry (sorry) to this live chat on our blog – I hope you can all join us tomorrow at 2:00 pm EST. I’m sure it’s going to be a fascinating conversation.

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This is rich. Karl Rove thinks our credibility in the Middle East was just now lost when the Obama administration wasn't willing to insert themselves into the middle of another country's civil war soon enough to suit all of the screeching neocons out there.

Someone has a bit of selective memory loss when it comes to his administration invading a couple of countries, one based on lies about WMD, or when it comes to the rest of the interfering the United States has been doing in that region of the world for decades on end, for that matter.

Sorry bud, but that ship has sailed a long, long time ago. If we had any credibility or accountability in the U.S. KKKarl would be sitting in a jail cell somewhere along a good portion of the rest of the Bush administration, instead of spouting B.S. on Faux "News":

WALLACE: Karl?

KARL ROVE, FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR: Well, we are two years too late. I mean two years ago in August President Obama said it was time for Assad to go. And we have done little to make him go since then. And as a result our credibility in the region is deeply damaged. Light weapons might have had a big impact two years ago. I'm dubious that how much of an impact it will have now. Though, we don't know all of what might be brought into the battlefield. The Gulf States have indicated willingness to supply heavier weapons to the rebels.

But this is -- I'm with Brit on the question of the American credibility. We had the announcement that the Iranians are sending 4,000 Revolutionary Guards who may already be on site. Hezbollah in -- out of Lebanon has opened -- has helped open several new fronts inside the country. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard are talking about creating a front in the Golan Heights by attacking Israel. American action two years ago might have made for a more stable situation today. I'm frankly concerned if -- that it is way too little and way too late.

Aww. Bankers are just trying to help the poor, just like they did with mortgages!

What kind of low-life bottom-feeders came up with this brilliant idea? I guess getting away with using these cards for government benefits just emboldened the bankers to push them for the working poor.

Can they get away with it? In this case, no, they can't. Fortunately, Pennsylvania requires that workers be paid by cash or check. But I'm sure even as we speak that ALEC is working hard to pass a law in every state to allow employers to siphon off even more cash from the working poor:

All Natalie Gunshannon wanted was to be paid a fair wage for her work, she said.

Gunshannon, 27, of Dallas Township, worked at McDonald's Restaurant on the Dallas Highway from April 24 to May 15. When she received her first paycheck, enclosed was a Chase Bank debit card with instructions on how to use it and the fees attached.

Her future earnings would be deposited into the debit card account and she could access her money from there. Gunshannon never signed the card and when she returned to work she asked her supervisor if she could be paid by check or by direct deposit. She was told the card was the only option.

Gunshannon, a single mother of one daughter, quit her job at McDonald's and went to see an attorney, Mike Cefalo of West Pittston. A class-action lawsuit was filed Thursday in Luzerne County Court by Cefalo on behalf of Gunshannon and other employees, seeking damages, fees and costs.

The suit seeks an unspecified amount of monetary damages and asks for punitive, compensatory and liquidated damages, plus legal fees and litigation costs against the company for its "ill-gotten gains contrary to justice, equity, good conscience and Pennsylvania law."

Gunshannon said she didn't sign the card and chose to not enroll in the payroll system offered because she felt the fees would be exorbitant and actually drop her earnings below minimum wage.

She was to be paid about $7.44 per hour - her paystub didn't list her hourly rate. Minimum wage is $7.25.

According to the complaint filed, the JP Morgan Chase payroll card lists several fees, including a $1.50 charge for ATM withdrawals, $5 for over-the-counter cash withdrawals, $1 per balance inquiry, 75 cents per online bill payment and $15 for lost/stolen card.

Gunshannon said she had taken her concerns to the main office of the franchise holder - Albert and Carol Mueller, trading as McDonald's, in Clarks Summit. She was told that the card was the only option, she said.

This is absolutely unconscionable.

Via Bloomberg News:

Based in part on surreptitious tape recordings, an FBI affidavit lays out allegations that a Sacred Heart pulmonologist kept patients too sedated to breathe on their own, then ordered unneeded tracheotomies for them -- enabling the for-profit hospital to reap revenue of as much as $160,000 per case.

The Sacred Heart case is unusual because of the troubling nature of some of the allegations, said Ryan Stumphauzer, a former federal health care fraud prosecutor in Miami who reviewed the affidavit. “A typical indictment might allege phantom billing or improper coding,” he said. “This complaint alleges the hospital and doctors were performing unnecessary invasive surgery to justify false billing.”

...

A physician and two Sacred Heart administrators worked with federal investigators, secretly taping conversations with other hospital staff members, according to the complaint. The 90-page FBI affidavit includes a quote attributed to Novak saying tracheotomies were the hospital’s “biggest money maker.” The hospital’s pulmonologist, or respiratory specialist, is quoted as saying during an April conversation that Novak asked him “to provide two more tracheotomy cases for the hospital soon,” before inspectors -- who had visited the hospital in March -- returned.

...

A Sacred Heart surgeon performed tracheotomies on 28 Medicare patients between early 2010 and January, according to the affidavit, which doesn’t identify the surgeon by name. Five patients died within two weeks -- a death rate three times the statewide rate in Illinois.

Sacred Heart owner Edward Novak, his chief financial officer and five physicians have already been charged by the government with Medicare fraud, in a criminal complaint alleging that they gave or received kickbacks in return for patient referrals.

After his arrest in April, Novak posted $10 million in cash to make bail, according to Randall Samborn, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office for the Northern District of Illinois.

Score one against the Brewer/Arpaio crowd:

The Supreme Court on Monday struck down an Arizona law that requires people to submit proof of citizenship when they register to vote.

The vote was 7-2. Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority, said that a 1993 federal law known as the Motor Voter Act takes precedence over the Arizona law because of its requirement that states “accept and use” the federal voter registration form.

Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, two members of the court’s conservative wing, dissented.

Only a handful of states have similar laws, which the states say are meant to reduce voter fraud, but civil rights groups worried that more states would have followed if the Supreme Court had upheld the Arizona law. Those groups say the Arizona law was an effort to discourage voting by legal immigrants. Groups opposed to the Arizona law said that the court had blocked an attempt at voter suppression.

More: Constitutional Accountability Center hails Supreme Court for upholding voter rights.

Score one against the Brewer/Arpaio crowd:

The Supreme Court on Monday struck down an Arizona law that requires people to submit proof of citizenship when they register to vote.

The vote was 7-2. Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority, said that a 1993 federal law known as the Motor Voter Act takes precedence over the Arizona law because of its requirement that states “accept and use” the federal voter registration form.

Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, two members of the court’s conservative wing, dissented.

Only a handful of states have similar laws, which the states say are meant to reduce voter fraud, but civil rights groups worried that more states would have followed if the Supreme Court had upheld the Arizona law. Those groups say the Arizona law was an effort to discourage voting by legal immigrants. Groups opposed to the Arizona law said that the court had blocked an attempt at voter suppression.

More: Constitutional Accountability Center hails Supreme Court for upholding voter rights.

No, it wasn't just bad luck when that Bank of America rep kept telling you they "never got the paperwork." We've been hearing these disgusting stories for a long time. Glad to hear they're making their way into court, where there's at least a chance that a class action suit might make Bank of America actually pay for some of their sins:

Bank of America Corp. (BAC), the second-biggest U.S. lender, rewarded staff with cash bonuses and gift cards for meeting quotas tied to sending distressed homeowners into foreclosure, former employees said in court documents.

Mortgage workers falsified records and were told to delay U.S. loan-assistance applications by requesting paperwork that the Charlotte, North Carolina-based bank had already received, according to statements from ex-employees filed last week in federal court in Boston. The lender improperly disqualified applicants to the Home Affordable Modification Program, or HAMP, according to a May 23 statement from Simone Gordon, a loss-mitigation specialist who left the company in 2012.

Bank of America Corp. is being sued by homeowners who didn't receive permanent loan modifications after making payments under trial programs, according to court papers.

“We were regularly drilled that it was our job to maximize fees for the bank by fostering and extending delay of the HAMP modification process by any means we could,” Gordon said. Managers instructed staff to “delay modifications by telling homeowners who called in that their documents were ‘under review,’ when in fact, there had been no review,” she said.

Bank of America, which has spent more than $45 billion to settle claims tied to its 2008 takeover of Countrywide Financial Corp., is being sued by homeowners who didn’t receive permanent loan modifications after making payments under trial programs, according to court papers. Statements from seven former loan employees were included in a filing last week as part of plaintiffs’ attempt to gain class-action status. The lender has denied the allegations.

Link:

Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old former National Security Agency contractor who leaked highly sensitive information about the super-secret agency, will answer questions online this morning through the website of The Guardian, which broke Snowden's initial story.

Snowden, who fled the U.S. after revealing top-secret details on the government's collection of Americans' phone and Internet records, has said he "does not expect to see home again." He claims that he took refuge in Hong Kong.

The British newspaper asked readers to post their questions to Snowden and recommend their favorites. He planned to go through the thread and embed his replies as posts in a live blog beginning at 11 a.m. ET

Underscoring Snowden's delicate situation in taking on the NSA, the newspapeh included what it called "an important caveat":

"(The) live chat is subject to Snowden's security concerns and also his access to a secure internet connection. It is possible that he will appear and disappear intermittently, so if it takes him a while to get through the questions, please be patient."

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Bill Maher used the recent news that Rep. John Dingell was being celebrated as the longest-serving member of Congress at the ripe old age of 86 to make the point that maybe some of these extremely old members of Congress should be retiring before we're rolling them out in wheel chairs like we saw with Robert Byrd and Strom Thurmond.

As Maher noted during his "New Rules" segment this Friday, it seems there only three ways a Congressman goes out: "They die in office, they cash in as a lobbyist, or they mistakenly tweet a picture of their dick."

I'm quite sure there are a lot more reasons than that which many of us could list here that finally led to a lot of them retiring or being run out of office, like being sent to prison, or if you're a Republican having some wingnut teabagger beat you in a primary race, among others, but I digress.

I agree with him completely on the average age of our Senators and some in the House being way too old. Sadly the fact that we're regularly getting really horrible legislation passed that any member of Congress may or may not have a clue about, probably has a whole lot less to do with the age of those in Congress than it does the fact that so many are bought and paid for by special interests that don't have the interest of the American people at heart.

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CNN media critic Howard Kurtz worried on Sunday that cable news was already spending too much time covering George Zimmerman's trial for the killing of Trayvon Martin, and that the "racially inflammatory" coverage was causing people to question whether African-Americans could get a fair trial in the U.S.

In an interview on Reliable Sources, Kurtz pointed out to CNN's new morning show host, Chris Cuomo, that the jury selection had not even been complete and the coverage already seemed to be "media overload."

"This case unfortunately really checks all the boxes of urgency," Cuomo explained. "Race looms large here. Some will take issue with that. But I think, objectively, it just does. And when that's the case, it really makes people even more tuned in."

Kurtz, however, insisted that "if it hadn't been for the racial aspect, if these were two white people or two black people involved, this wouldn't be getting any national attention."

"But race is involved anyway you want to look at it," Cuomo replied. "Here's a bet you and I can make: I do not think this story will resonate from a ratings perspective the way that Jodi Arias did. Why? Because this one is about real things beyond the satisfaction of the victim's family and the call for justice."

"But as the media choose up sides here, in my view, some people saying, 'Trayvon Martin, obviously unarmed teenager ends up dead,' others thinking that George Zimmerman got railroaded, there was pressure to indict him," Kurtz opined. "I fear -- and I think we saw signs of this when the story was red hot the first time -- that the media might play a racially inflammatory role."

"Racially inflammatory, meaning, playing to the fact that Trayvon is African-American?" Cuomo wondered. "What do you mean?"

"Meaning portraying this as kind of a Rorschach test of whether or not somebody or not can get justice in this system when the victim, sadly, tragically, is a black teenager. And of course as you know, George Zimmerman's brother, Robert, thinks the media are already showing signs of bias against his brother."

Cuomo noted that some people held the opinion that "if this were a white who had been victimized" then Zimmerman would have already been brought to justice.

"I don't know that either is 100 percent true," he added. "But I do believe the issues involved make this worthy of coverage."

Hey kids! Wolfrum here, and I'll be your host this week. A quick fact: I'm an immigrant here in Brazil.And WOW does that make me fertile.

Pinholes of Grace: How one act of love and humanity can change everything.

David von Ebers: For SCOTUS, the First Amendment starts getting confusing when it comes to protests.

Nieman Journalism Lab: In Wisconsin, Republicans are trying to hammer another nail in Journalism's coffin.

Uni-Watch: A very special Father's Day.

Finally, if it's Monday, it must be time for some Star Wars French Ballet Disco.

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