Aired on Monday, Rachel Maddow reported on the switch a day made between the White House statements of the weekend and those on Monday.  Jane Hamsher, of FireDogLake, joined Rachel at the end of the segment to discuss her effort to lead a progressive push for a public healthcare option in any case. [My comment after the video.]

[my comments] I do not agree with Hamsher that no reform is better than some reform, if that’s her position. I wonder, however, if that’s exactly what she said. Her response to Maddow’s question was more on the lines of ‘Why should we have to make a choice?’

If the final choice is no reform, by rejecting a bill created in the first 8 months of a presidency, or accepting a significant reform that will help millions yet needs more work, will she continue to say the reform must fail because it does not have a public option?

This is hardball politics. Usually that means that without a unified party, and the Republicans are better than the Democrats at a unified front, there is compromise at the last moment. I’m hopeful for a public option as well but we are being outgunned on the pr front by the Republicans yet again. We’ll have to wait and see.

I don’t believe that anyone should use a cell ph0ne while driving. California was ahead of the game on this one, but apparently ”seven years ago, the federal National Highway Transportation and Safety Administration recommended that drivers not use cell phones, even with hands-free equipment, while on the road except in emergencies.”

The proposals from the agency in 2002 and 2003 were only made public Tuesday by The Center for Auto Safety and Public Citizen, two public interest groups that filed a lawsuit to obtain the documents under the Freedom of Information Act.

The NY Times reported on Tuesday that “the recommendation was never made public, in part because of concern by administrators that public officials, including members of Congress, would be angry, thinking that the agency had “crossed the line into lobbying.”"

Excerpts from the findings of the NHTSA’s cell phone-and-driving-related reports can be found here. None of this saw the light of day under the Bush administration and the Republican control Congress at the time of the report. My guess is no one wanted to buck the cell phone industry which is a huge racket, in my opinion. I consider my cell phone to be a neccessary evil at this point, an expense I would prefer not to have.

Rasmussen reported today that it’s still trendy to “Blame Bush” for the economic downturn that has plagued America since Bush’s reign.

Sixty-two percent (62%) of U.S. voters agree with the president that the problems are due to the recession that began under the Bush administration.

Rasmussen also notes that President Obama has “maintained high and relatively stable approval numbers since January, ” and he got a “bounce this past week in the Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll from his nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court.”

Frank Rich on why the Obama administration must persue a “truth commission” on torture and the Bush administration:

TO paraphrase Al Pacino in “Godfather III,” just when we thought we were out, the Bush mob keeps pulling us back in. And will keep doing so. No matter how hard President Obama tries to turn the page on the previous administration, he can’t. Until there is true transparency and true accountability, revelations of that unresolved eight-year nightmare will keep raining down drip by drip, disrupting the new administration’s high ambitions.

Rich finishes with this point:

If the Obama administration really wants to move on from the dark Bush era, it will need a new commission, backed up by serious law enforcement, to shed light on where every body is buried.

Today, the EPA declared “carbon dioxide and five other heat-trapping gases to be pollutants that threaten public health and welfare, setting in motion a process that for the first time in the United States will regulate the gases blamed for global warming.” This is a huge step forward from the Bush administration’s stonewalling on this issue.

The E.P.A. said the science supporting its so-called endangerment finding was “compelling and overwhelming.” The ruling triggers a 60-day comment period before any proposed regulations governing emissions of greenhouse gases are published.

Lisa P. Jackson, the E.P.A. administrator, said: “This finding confirms that greenhouse gas pollution is a serious problem now and for future generations. Fortunately, it follows President Obama’s call for a low-carbon economy and strong leadership in Congress on clean energy and climate legislation.”

The EPA’s press release is here. Environmentalists are celebrating! The naysayer’s are… of course, naysaying.

On Thursday, the Department of Justice released “four secret memos used by the Bush administration to justify torture.” The ACLU is calling for the DoJ to “appoint an independent prosecutor to investigate torture under the Bush administration.”

The memos describe “brutal interrogation techniques” used by the C.I.A.:

In dozens of pages of dispassionate legal prose, the methods approved by the Bush administration for extracting information from senior operatives of Al Qaeda are spelled out in careful detail — like keeping detainees awake for up to 11 straight days, placing them in a dark, cramped box or putting insects into the box to exploit their fears.

The interrogation methods were authorized beginning in 2002, and some were used as late as 2005 in the C.I.A.’s secret overseas prisons. The techniques were among the Bush administration’s most closely guarded secrets, and the documents released Thursday afternoon were the most comprehensive public accounting to date of the program.

The C.I.A. officers involved have been granted immunity from prosecution. Marc Ambinder notes:

President Obama has endorsed this concept, and so has his attorney general, but today, alongside the release of Bush-era documents justifying the CIA torture program, the Justice Department will make clear that no CIA officers or officials who IN GOOD FAITH relied on the memos to interrogate prisoners will be subject to criminal prosecution, according to the AP. This is a victory for the CIA, which had been seeking a formal, public statement for its case officers, and which had been worried that the document’s disclosures could subject many of them to future prosecution.  Now, even if Congress launches investigations, the CIA will be, more or less, safe.

President Obama’s statement on the release of the memos is here. David Axelrod told Politico that “President Barack Obama spent about a month pondering whether to release Bush-era memos about CIA interrogation techniques, and considered it “a weighty decision.””

“He thought very long and hard about it, consulted widely, because there were two principles at stake,” Axelrod said . “One is … the sanctity of covert operations … and keeping faith with the people who do them, and the impact on national security, on the one hand. And the other was the law and his belief in transparency.”

There’s some sick, twisted and evil stuff in those memos. FireDogLake has a petition to Attorney General Eric Holder call on him to “Appoint a Special Prosecutor.” Please sign it.

The WaPo has a 4 page expose today on the fact that the waterboarding and ”rough interrogation of Abu Zubaida produced false leads.” It’s really quite a read:

When CIA officials subjected their first high-value captive, Abu Zubaida, to waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods, they were convinced that they had in their custody an al-Qaeda leader who knew details of operations yet to be unleashed, and they were facing increasing pressure from the White House to get those secrets out of him.

The methods succeeded in breaking him, and the stories he told of al-Qaeda terrorism plots sent CIA officers around the globe chasing leads.

In the end, though, not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida’s tortured confessions, according to former senior government officials who closely followed the interrogations.

Topping it off, former president George W. Bush had publicly described Abu Zubaida “as “al-Qaeda’s chief of operations,” and other top officials called him a “trusted associate” of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and a major figure in the planning of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.”

None of that was accurate, the new evidence showed.

Abu Zubaida was not even an official member of al-Qaeda, according to a portrait of the man that emerges from court documents and interviews with current and former intelligence, law enforcement and military sources.

Torture doesn’t work. The Bush Administration didn’t care. They abandoned the law, they spat on the Geneva Convention, and they sullied our good name in the world.

On Monday, President Barack Obama called into question the legitimacy of former President Bush’s signing statements and ordered all “executive branch departments and agencies” to seek the “advice of the Attorney General before relying on signing statements issued prior to the date of this memorandum as the basis for disregarding, or otherwise refusing to comply with, any provision of a statute.”

Although the practice of using signing statements has been around since the 19th century, former President Bush, “broke all records, using signing statements to challenge about 1,200 sections of bills over his eight years in office, about twice the number challenged by all previous presidents combined, according to data compiled by Christopher Kelley, a political science professor at Miami University in Ohio.”

Many of Mr. Bush’s challenges were based on an expansive view of the president’s power, as commander in chief, to take actions he believes necessary, regardless of what Congress says in legislation.

The directive issued by President Obama is another step in rescinding some of the many policies of the Bush administration that have come in question throughout his two terms in office. Without question President Obama has said to the Bush administration, Bush’s abuse of power will not stand in his administration.

Today, President Barack Obama lifted the strict limits on Stem Cell research imposed during the Bush administration. In a ceremony in the White House’s East Room, “before an audience that included lawmakers, scientists and patients, several of them in wheelchairs, Mr. Obama announced that he was issuing an executive order intended to advance the research.”

Obama said he “hoped Congress would follow with bipartisan legislation that would ease the existing restrictions even more,” and he pledged that “his administration will ‘make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology.’”

Needless to say, the anti-science, wingnut crowd is in a tizzy. However, Nancy Reagan praised Obama and many look at the lift of the ban as a “A ‘Welcome’ Change of Faith .”

Former George W. Bush aides, Karl Rove and Harriet Miers, have finally agreed to testify under other before Congress on the firings of U.S. attorneys during the Bush administration.

The Bush White House had fought attempts to force Karl Rove and Harriet Miers to testify, and the agreement — steered by aides to President Barack Obama — ended that constitutional standoff with Congress. Both the White House and lawmakers, especially now that Democrat Obama has replaced Republican Bush — were leery of having a judge settle the question about the limits of executive privilege, for fear of losing.

Under the negotiated agreement, Rove and Miers will be allowed to testify at closed depositions “under the penalty for perjury.”

Rep. John Conyers said in a statement:

“This is a victory for the separation of powers and congressional oversight. It is also a vindication of the search for truth. I am determined to have it known whether U.S. attorneys in the Department of Justice were fired for political reasons, and if so, by whom.”

AP reports that the Congressional committee will “probably make the transcripts public, said a committee aide, who wasn’t authorized to immediately disclose committee plans.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the agreement “is a great victory for the Constitution, the rule of law and the separation of powers.”

“Congress now has the opportunity to uncover the truth and determine whether improper criteria were used by the Bush administration to dismiss and retain U.S. attorneys,” she said.

Maybe now we will finally get to the bottom of what really went on at “Mad Max’s Justice Department.” I will however, remain skeptical on that frame of thought. It will be a long, long time before we get to the truth, if we indeed ever do.

Today, the Obama Administration’s Justice Department stepped up to reveal some of the Bush Administration’s many secrets and “released a long-secret legal document from 2001 in which the Bush administration claimed the military could search and seize terror suspects in the United States without warrants.”

The legal memo was written about a month after the Sept. 11 terror attacks. It says constitutional protections against unlawful search and seizure would not apply to terror suspects in the U.S., as long as the president or another high official authorized the action.

Even after the Bush administration rescinded that legal analysis, the Justice Department refused to release its contents, prompting a standoff with congressional Democrats.

It was one of nine memos released by the Obama administration today.  The author of the memo was John Yoo.

In a speech just a few hours before the memos were released, Attorney General Eric Holder said:

“Too often over the past decade, the fight against terrorism has been viewed as a zero-sum battle with our civil liberties. Not only is that school of thought misguided, I fear that in actuality it does more harm than good.”

In a related piece of news today, documents  were also released that “show the CIA destroyed nearly 100 tapes of terror interrogations, far more than has previously been acknowledged.”

I hope the Obama Administration continues to expose the wrongs wrought on our nation by the Bush Administration and that they will seek justice by filing criminal charges against the Bush Administration.

It should be crystal clear to everyone now why Barack Obama put his faith in Hillary Clinton when he nominated her to be Secretary of State. She’s simply the best person there was for the job and her first trip abroad has shown that from the moment it started.

Everywhere she has gone in Asia, Clinton has tried to highlight some of the tangible ways that the Obama administration hopes to be different from its predecessor: a commitment to address climate change, the appointment of a Middle East peace envoy, a refocusing on Afghanistan and an effort to reach out to longtime U.S. antagonists such as Iran, North Korea and Burma.

The administration is so new that many of these shifts are still wisps of ideas, not fully formed policies. In some areas, such as relegating human rights in China to a side issue, it is uncertain whether Obama’s team will do things much differently than Bush’s.

But as every politician knows, the tone can make all the difference. Clinton has emphasized that she is looking for partnership — or better yet, a “comprehensive partnership” — on these issues.

Her pitch is that the problems of the world — the financial crisis, climate change and extremism — are so overwhelming that no country can handle them alone, certainly not the United States. Remember, she’s saying, how the Bush administration went to war in Iraq virtually by itself (with Clinton’s vote of approval)? That’s in the past. We need help. And we want to listen.

On Tuesday, Secretary Clinton told students at Tokyo University, “My trip here today is to hear your views, because I believe strongly that we learn from listening to one another. And that is, for me, part of what this first trip of mine as secretary of state is about.”

Can you imagine Condi saying something like that on a trip abroad. Not. My, my how times have changed. And for the better. In fact, “there are few better ambassadors for a listening tour” than Hillary Clinton.

And not because she has already conducted one — the famous trip through New York state a decade ago when she contemplated a run for the U.S. Senate — but because the world stage fits her like an old shoe.

She was made for the job. Go read all of Glenn Kessler’s piece in the WaPo.

[Originally published at TaylorMarsh.com]