Wonkette

Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman has built a long and distinguished career impersonating that uncle who shows up at family reunions to drink seltzer water and complain about his chillblains. Now he is holding forth on one of his most cherished causes: waterboarding. MORE »

Dick Cheney is so evil, the Post has started a blog about him. In a lengthy four-part series, the Post will lay bare the Dick Cheney story, and basically summarize and clarify everything we already know about him with but new, entertainingly terrifying anecdotes and interviews.

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• Americans fighting terrorism may be protected from “prosecution for past violations of the War Crimes Act of 1996…That law criminalizes violations of the Geneva Conventions governing conduct in war and threatens the death penalty if U.S.-held detainees die in custody from abusive treatment.” [WP]
• No significant troop withdrawal in sight this year. [LAT]
• “Unable to agree on major lobbying and ethics legislation, Senate and House leaders have made plans to adopt vastly scaled-back versions of the measures as part of their rules so that lawmakers can claim that they responded to recent congressional scandals.” [WP]
• Pro-immigrant rights groups divided by Senate immigration measure, some say it contains “loopholes that could criminalize individuals, including legal immigrants, for helping family members or friends who are in the country illegally.” [WP]
• Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.) has a wife and close friend inside consulting firm ICG Government, “a consulting company for technology firms seeking government contracts.” [WP]
• Minimum wage may increase to $7.15, House votes today. [NYT]

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• House Republicans took up military tribunals for detainees yesterday, embracing a significantly more conservative position than their Senate counterparts. Meanwhile, President Bush has asked Congress to ratify the tribunals already set up by the Defense Department. [WP, NYT]

• Between Israel’s new war in Gaza and Lebanon, Iran’s nukes, and Iraq just being Iraq, the Bush administration is in a bit of trouble mideast-wise, and it’s all Iran’s fault. [WP]
• Hillary Clinton faces an electorate made up of people who have already made up their minds about her. [WP]
• Congressional Democrats present their own gay marriage political lightning rod: the minimum wage raise. With state ballot initiatives and everything. [NYT]
• The Emergency Broadcast System is being updated to eventually include disaster text messages from your federal government. [NYT]
• Jack Abramoff, Ralph Reed, Michael Scanlon, and Neil Volz are all being sued by an Indian tribe for fraudulently closing said tribe’s casino while working for a rival. [NYT]

Condoleezza Rice made persistent denials last week that the “United States does not engage in torture, doesn’t condone it, doesn’t expect its employees to engage in it.” These statements seem at odds, to put it mildly, with what Donald Rumsfeld might call “the facts on the ground,” including the existence of “black sites,” “extreme rendition,” and Dick Cheney’s position that torture is just one tool in the wide array of democracy’s building blocks. A quote in today’s Washington Post from Jim Wilkinson, mini-bar miser and Rice spokesman, clears things up. Discussing the food options available on Rice’s plane, Wilkinson opines, “Some people hate the meatballs, but most hate the wing-dings. They violate the laws of war, the Geneva Convention and the international convention on torture. They’re sooo bad.” MORE »