The New York Times has an excellent, depressing article on the ability of polluters to disregard the Clean Water Act in the wake of recent Supreme Court rulings.

It seems obvious that pollution remediation should be built in as a non-negotiable, non-deferrable cost for any business plan. But, unsurprisingly, people making their money dumping lead into creeks and streams don’t agree.

Reading about the debt and service cuts that have accompanied these winter games in Vancouver, I am once again thankful Chicago didn’t get the 2016 Olympics. I love watching the Olympics, but staging the games has become the same kind of power-broker real-estate scam that governs most local governance.

Boosters like to claim that workers will see jobs, but those are transitory, the debt is lasting and the people who wring speculator’s rates out of the land are the only ones who come out ahead.

Thanks to No Games Chicago for fighting the good fight on this one.

As the New York Times reports, no one will pay any price for the U.S.’s embrace of torture conducted in the wake of September 11.

After five years of often bitter internal debate, the Justice Department concluded in a report released Friday that the lawyers who gave legal justification to the Bush administration’s brutal interrogation tactics for terrorism suspects used flawed legal reasoning but were not guilty of professional misconduct.

Sure, the lawyers may have enabled war crimes–in contravention of international and domestic law as well as any notions of decency–but taking away their license to practice law would just be a step to far.

“They didn’t keep the organization alive. They thought it was out there to use whenever they wanted to use it. But with constituents who feel like they’ve been part of a revolution — as ours did in ’80 and ’81 — you’ve got to feed them. You’ve got to make sure that they feel important.” Instead, says [former Reagan strategist Ed] Rollins, OFA “e-mailed them to death, but without any real steps to make them feel a part of the process, like they felt a part of the campaign.”

Rolling Stone has a great article, “No We Can’t,” on how Organizing for America, Obama’s key web/volunteer organization during theelection, was co-opted into the Democratic National Committee post-election, ultimately becoming toothless.

Edit: Charles Homan of Washington Monthly has an interesting article on the same subject, “The Party of Obama.”

It’s funny–I was called a moron, part of a circular firing squad, and worse for arguing what the White House communications team has just determined. As the Washington Post reports, after a year-end analysis, “White House advisers said the president’s communications team had not taken the initiative often enough and had allowed drawn-out debates in Congress, and relentless criticism by Republicans, to drown out his message.”

To bad this only comes after Obama and Congressional Democrats have lost the overwhelming momentum they had after the 2008 elections. I don’t think they’ll be able to get that back, but hopefully they’ll be more effective in (1) calling out Republicans as obstructionist and (2) articulating a compelling Democratic vision of government. I doubt it, though.