Senator Chuck Grassley has released an internal memo addressed to the head of the  U.S. Citizenship and Naturalization Services (formerly part of the old INS) that is no less than a back-door plan to grant amnesty to hundreds of thousands of people in the country illegally without any action by Congress at all.

I'll let SCOTUSWiki speak on this one:

Those Hospitable Danes

The count on “Hopenhagen” (as the high-powered PR firm Ogilvy who is running the show dubbed it) so far: 1,000 limos, 120 private jets. Why are 100,000 people travelling to Copenhagen this week? Could it be the free hookers*?

Anarchists in Copenhagen?

Interview With History

That is the title of an outstanding collection of political interviews by perhaps the most insightful and compelling journalist of her time, Oriana Fallaci, who passed away in 2006.

Fallaci was larger than life. She fought with the Italian partisans against Mussolini in World War II and covered every subsequent war, often from the front. Maybe it was her liberal credentials (she was against all wars, but was not a pacifist) that gave her unprecedented access to the most singular historic figures of the last half of the last century. It certainly wasn’t because she pulled her punches, as can be seen by how she responded to attempted bullying from Henry Kissinger and the Nixon White House. She simply threatened to give her tapes of the Kissinger interview to The Times, The Post etc. so they could compare what Kissinger actually said with the White House spin. Kissinger and Nixon decided to let sleeping dogs lie.

There's been a great deal of wailing and ka-nashing of teeth by liberals who push the meme that the Republicans are single-handedly screwing up Obama's health care reform efforts. But for those dastardly bastards, the saying goes, HMObamaplan would have been passed and implemented by now, and we'd all be floating on clouds of government-supplied painkillers, our every ache and pain eased by goosedown comforters while nurses who look like the young Elizabeth Taylor would hover round waiting on us. Not to mention the free government cheese we'd all get in the mail weekly.

Remember recovery.gov, a/k/a "the 'New Dawn' in transparency and accountability" that was going to tell us in detail where all our money was going and how it is helping us build a newer, shinier society? Well, it's finally up and running, with some cool interactive maps showing who's getting some of the money.

Anyone who has watched the American political process at the national level through more than two administrations knows that sooner or later every cornball cliche' comes true - what goes around comes around; the more things change the more they stay the same; meet the new boss, same as the old boss, blah blah, you name it. But so soon? And on such a campaign centerpiece issue?

A post by catchy with a partial quote in the “Transparency My A$$” diary caught my eye recently. When I followed the link back to the source, I found a plan for a complete paradigm change: nothing less than an outline for an open source-type alternative that could address the wholesale failures of today’s MSM. Rather than summarize, I’ll ask you to read the whole piece here.

The Federal Reserve has lost two trillion dollars of our money since September 2008. Over $500 billion of that was simply stolen, and nearly one trillion dollars was lost on bad loans to banks and brokerage houses with strong ties to the administration, many of them Ben Bernanke's buddies at Goldman Sachs.* The balance was given to the Europeans with no requirement that they ever repay us. Ten billion was earmarked for SETI in the hopes of finding additional insolvent borrowers. True or false?

I originally stuck the kernel of this in last Friday's open thread, but I think there is more to be said on the subject by a bigger cross-section of Forvmites.

The subject of course is the four Bush DOJ memos relating to "enhanced interrogation techniques" that recently were released by the Obama Administration. Today's LA Times has a video from Fox News detailing Dick Cheney's response to the release of those memoranda, and this is part of what Cheney had to say: