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Michelle was great. Hillary was excellent. Bill was terrific.

Kerry just knocked it out of the park.

p.s. new music coming soon …

Bruce is on board.

TBogg has a sly, funny angle here.

Update: And a sad, fond farewell to Danny Federici.

I hope you and yours are well.

These folks are having a tough go of it.

Who’s responsible for their hardships?

Who are the people in positions of access, leadership and power making decisions that are furthering these humanitarian disasters with little to no relief in sight?

Who want to expand the chaos in the Middle East outward?

Take a look here.

that when your voice of intuition grips you and affirms what your eyes see is true but some Authoritative Voice In Media or Extremely Serious Foreign Policy Expert tells you otherwise, you will not fold and accept their lies views without some thorough fact-checking and bullshit scooping.

Wonderful Digby leads us to David Rees at Huffington Post. It’s just too chock full of snarky goodness to quote snippets of .. ya gotta read the whole broadside to appreciate it.

Trust yourself. They are incompetent. They are liars. They did get it all wrong.

So, as Atrios likes to muse, why are they still on our teevees?

Why can’t Sheldon Whitehouse be in the White House?

He shined a bright light on the Department Of Justice today.

I’m watching a little bit of this all-night Senate debate on the Levin-Reed amendment and listening to some of these Republican asshats (I’m lookin’ at you, Bunning from Kentucky) trotting out the same boring talking points and reading them painfully slowly from their double-spaced print-out in such a stultifying monotone it just crystallizes how fucked up this quagmire is.

Impeach.

Withdraw.

Rebuild.

Oh, and Lieberman?

Fuck you.

Today’s post by Glenn Greenwald, further clarifying his analysis from the previous day, is well worth reading. As are all his posts. As are the rigorous, (mostly) thoughtful comment threads that follow each one.

I’ve thought a lot about notions of ‘American exceptionalism’ in recent years. Glenn sums things up well in these paragraphs:

So much of the intensity and anger driving the criticisms of the Bush presidency — certainly my own, and much of what I read (as exemplified above) — is grounded in a fervent belief in American political values, its political principles and its constitutional framework. The anger comes not from a belief that the U.S. is an evil and corrupt entity, but from the opposite view. It comes from witnessing the all-out assault on these vaunted political principles and values and the complete corruption, close to the destruction, of our country’s national character that has made the U.S. such an important and admired presence in the world for so long.

To believe in America’s political values and to observe the importance of its role in the world is not “American exceptionalism.” Like all countries, America has erred many times and has been capable of evil. Other countries have critically important virtues that America lacks. As I detail in my book, America has been far too quick to use war as a foreign policy option and has become increasingly imperialistic in precisely the way the Founders so stridently warned against.

It’s sadness and anger I feel for how this country has squandered its ideals and principles. Not fatalism or defeatism or surrender or other mistaken notions that chest-beating ‘patriots’ attempt to hang on those who point out our failings and short-sighted, misguided policies. We may disagree on solutions, but we all need to get back to some ground rules on what we all have in common and what’s at stake.

Happy Interdependence Day.