Glenn, can you detect any discernable policy differences between the Holder and Gonzales Justice Departments?

Every time Holder has made the slightest peep about investigating Bush administration abuses we have Republicans, most notably flannel-shirted quadrennial GOP presidential candidate Sen. Lamar Alexander, threatening to expand investigations to include the renditions of the Clinton era, when Holder was a Deputy Attorney General.

Shamefully, this explicit intimidation tactic appears to have worked.

Holder’s Justice Department has been virtually indistinguishable -- at least as far as I can tell -- from that marked by Alberto Gonzales’ tenure as Attorney General. He hasn’t even fired some of the wacko Bush political holdovers who refused to resign at the conclusion of Bush's term.

To date, Holder has been the biggest disappointment of the Obama administration.

Manufacturing is the only means for creating wealth and the United States has foolishly gotten out of the manufacturing business, instead opting to shuffle paper and flip burgers.

Until we face the fact that the decline of American manufacturing and heavy industry is the real root of our economic disaster and establish a National Economic Policy to subsidize and protect new American industries -- such as a domestic consumer electronics, hi-def TVs, computer chips, alternative energy, electric autos, etc., -- America is doomed to continue its downward slide into impoverishment.

The Chinese certainly understand the connection between manufacturing and wealth. Why don't we?

And our Congress has become nothing but bag men for the oligarchy. Is it any wonder our economy is in the toilet?

I want riots, chaos, and fear (in the hearts of TPTB). The Kleptocracy must come to an end. Naomi Klein warned us with her "The Shock Doctrine" but in spite of that warning, it is still being carried out on us now rather than poor Latin American countries and we STILL do nothing.

When you get down to it, it was widespread property damage that brought about American civil rights reforms, and blood in the streets that ended the Vietnam war.

Cheney's secret program had nothing to do with assassinating Al Qaeda leaders. Why the hell would that have to be kept secret from Congress? The Bush administration was supposed to be in the business of killing Al Qaeda leaders. The entire world knew it.

No, whatever "the program too secret to brief Congress about as required by law" was, we can be sure it was highly illegal and blatantly unconstitutional -- probably operations directed against the Republicans' domestic political opponents.

As for the current controversy, how is the news that the CIA (at Bush/Cheney's direction) failed to keep Congress informed any different from the Bush regime's contemptuous refusal to answer Congressional subpoenas and its demonstrable record of perjury when its aparatchiks did testify?

Our corporate news media wakes up in a new world every day like an amnesiac.

Cheney's secret program had nothing to do with assassinating Al Qaeda leaders. Why the hell would that have to be kept secret from Congress? The Bush administration was supposed to be in the business of killing Al Qaeda leaders. The entire world knew it.

No, whatever "the program too secret to brief Congress about as required by law" was, we can be sure it was highly illegal and blatantly unconstitutional -- probably operations directed against the Republicans' domestic political opponents.

As for the current controversy, how is the news that the CIA (at Bush/Cheney's direction) failed to keep Congress informed any different from the Bush regime's contemptuous refusal to answer Congressional subpoenas and its demonstrable record of perjury when its aparatchiks did testify?

Our corporate news media wakes up in a new world every day like an amnesiac.

If Sarah Palin decides to run in 2012, even the Republican mouth-breathing religious-right base would be forced to compare her to much more skilled politicians in the primaries.

At some point, she'd have to speak unscripted, as in interviews -- and we know how that would go.

When all of the GOP candidates spout the same right-wing talking points that made her so popular with the base, Palin will be just an also-ran.

The corporate media and its "stars" still don't seem to get the big picture about the Bush regime. This wasn't an imperial presidency so much as a presidential dictatorship with an autocratic vice president, answerable neither to the executive or legislative branches, thrown in.

During the Bush years, there was no congressional oversight -- and the press served as shameless courtiers more concerned with access than their crucial function in a democracy. Congressional suboenas and explicit laws were ignored and perjury was suborned.

The Bush years were not "business as usual." At the very least, a Truth Commission needs to be established. Whether prosecutions proceed from that should be determined by that commission's findings.

The mass rapes during the Soviet occupation of Germany wasn't simple revenge. After two ruinous wars in a generation, it was a conscious and deliberate policy by Stalin to breed-out German martial aggression by introducing Slavic DNA into the German gene pool.

It appears to have worked -- ruthless but effective.

We expect the Republicans to delay and obstruct any meaningful health-care reform. They've been doing it since the Truman administration.

It's the so-called "Blue Dog" conservative Democrats who are the real problem. However, if Harry Reid was really serious about forcing the health-care bill through over Blue Dog resistance, there's no doubt it could be done.

Stripping recalcitrant Democrats of their committee assignments and chairmanships, relocating their offices to remote broom closets and sending the message that they will receive no support from the party in their re-election efforts would get most, if not all, to become enthusiastic supporters of the bill.

All it would take is political will -- something sorely lacking in Harry Reid.