Single moms are signing up for the same reasons that married dads are signing up. (See http://thinkprogress.org/2009/10/19/man-joins-army-health)

They're in desperate need of a job with decent benefits. Civilian hiring has collapsed in many places. Benefits, unless you're a Wall Street banker or member of congress, are non-existent. The army offers both. And they feel they can handle the Army's demands.

They're being accepted because as Joe Buck says the Army (also Marines and Navy, less so the Air Force), fighting 2 wars, and stretched so thin as to be non-existent, is desperate for warm bodies. And the Army feels that it can bully its recruits into submitting to any demand.

In any institution under great stress occasional explosions happen. This is one.

who has been "bubbled in" as fast as this one has been. From campaign promises of addressing the concerns of the majority of Americans by an honest broker government to business as usual with the wealthy, the powerful and the connected took less than 6 weeks and has become more pronounced as time has gone on.

Nor, can I recall an administration, and I vividly recall Nixon and Ford, more determined to continue the worst aspects of it predecessor, and even more determined than they were to ignore or condone unlawful behavior.

Looks like a fix went in early, and the only questions remaining are how much more erosion of civil rights, concentration of wealth and power and corruption of governmental power to serve the venal and the craven will occur during this administration as it continues in the same direction as the last one.

Confiscatory taxes:

70% above1 million,

80% above 2 million,

85% above 3 million,

90% above 4 million,

95% above 5 million,

98% above 6 million.

And bring back the estate tax!

90% 2-5 million,

95% 5-10 million,

100% above 10 million.

What do your children deserve?

All the education they can handle and your unchanging love.

You want to control the money this country made it possible for you to earn?

Give it away in your lifetime.

Endow a foundation.

Spend it on the public good: libraries, infrastructure, health clinics, charities: public, private, religious.

Let them get their jollies and measure their success by pulling wings off flies or something.

Would it be irresponsible to speculate?

It would be irresponsible, and silly, not to!

The Post plans to join the GOP in their self-destructive echo chamber?

Who knew?

After Froomkin goes, who cares?

However long the "administration task force on detention" has been together working on their recommendations it has been too long. They have all lost their minds. If Secretary Gates accedes to this grotesque proposal, so has he.

To allow or even encourage a tortured prisoner who is still imprisoned with no realistic hope of release to plead guilty to death at the hands of his torturers is a sub-human response to a difficult problem. A problem which is of America's own making. No one forced us to defy all our own history and international law to torture these men.

Allowing judicial murder of these brutalized human shells in order to relieve the American government of embarrassment, to literally bury the problem so we can "move on," is beyond any notion I have ever had of American ideals and justice. It is, indeed, beyond any America I find recognizable.

That this perversion of American justice can even be published as a serious proposal proves beyond doubt that those in the American government responsible for protecting us from from totalitarian terrorists have themselves become totalitarians at heart. bin-laden has called Americans oppressors. Policies like this prove his point. We have indeed become indistinguishable from the enemy we say we are fighting.

but I can live without their prosecutions.

However, the authors of these memos and the architects of the torture policies: Bush, Cheney, Yoo, Addington, Bybee, Rice, Feith, (who have I missed?) should be hounded to the ends of the earth until the end of their lives. First in the pack should be the United States Department of Justice and the United States Congress.

We can never wipe out the stain that Bush smeared on the United States, but we can at least acknowledge that it is there.

Pleased although not surprised to hear about excellent FBI agents. I know there has to be someone doing competent work* or the FBI would not have any successes. Hillerman occasionally mentions agents who are savvy and helpful. And the FBI did get it right on torture interrogations at Guantanamo

Unfortunately the anthrax investigation seems to have brought out all the worst that a bureaucratic organization can do. One has to wonder why.

* Although I admit that the revelations about the FBI Crime Lab a few years ago really shook my confidence.

who writes mysteries involving Navajo lore invariably portrays the FBI as clueless and incompetent at best. He often dubs it The Federal Bureau of Ineptitude, which I have assumed is common nomenclature for the organization in the southwest.

Evidently FBI ineptitude is not confined to the Navajo Reservation, but, hey, they're great at bureaucratic infighting and bamboozling Congress. [Admittedly the last is not difficult.]

but things like this are so depressing that I really just want to curl up in a ball and cry.

Tomorrow I'll be better, I think, but watching my country being killed an inch at a time is excruciating.

If the advantages for Obama of supporting this evisceration of the Constitution outweigh the disadvantages he will support it. If supporting this craven sellout becomes too costly he will withdraw his support.

Our job is to make supporting the FISA sellout too painful and too costly for Obama to support it.

I have donated to Blue America* in that cause.

*www.actblue.com/page/fisa