It appears that Mitt made a secret promise to sign the Employment Non-Discrimination Act to the Log Cabin Republicans:

Romney’s greatest asset as a politician is his total lack of integrity, honesty or consistency. He is perfectly willing to go before the religious right one day and pledge fealty to them, and the Log Cabin Republicans the next day to do the same. And, apparently, that is what he has done, in private. [ Log Cabin Republican executive director, R. Clarke] Cooper asserted repeatedly that, “With a President Romney we’re confident we can work with him [on ENDA].” But when asked why, Cooper offered only reasons that Romney should work with them: that discrimination is a form of economic inefficiency and impediment to job growth. But you could make the same argument to any president. The question is what Romney has said that gives them such confidence. Cooper says, “Romney been clear in his opposition to workplace discrimination.” He also seemed to conflate private conversations with LCR representatives and his public pronouncements, saying such things as, “[Romney] is acutely aware of the problem of the patchwork of discrimination,” meaning that it creates problems for businesses that some states ban anti-gay discrimination and others do not. Later, clearly referencing private communications with the campaign, Cooper said, “Based on our work with the campaign and Gov. Romney, I’m confident [that he will support anti-discrimination legislation].” Cooper was coy and vague about what exactly Romney said to inspire such confidence; he says Romney “has been adamant” in opposition to discrimination. Romney is clearly quite a salesman.

Mr. Cooper is either deluded or a complete idiot.

Shamiur Rahman, a 19 year old of Bangladeshi extraction, was hired by the police as an informant with specific instructions to bait people to get them to make intemperate statements:

A paid informant for the New York Police Department’s intelligence unit was under orders to “bait” Muslims into saying inflammatory things as he lived a double life, snapping pictures inside mosques and collecting the names of innocent people attending study groups on Islam, he told The Associated Press.

Shamiur Rahman, a 19-year-old American of Bangladeshi descent who has now denounced his work as an informant, said police told him to embrace a strategy called “create and capture.” He said it involved creating a conversation about jihad or terrorism, then capturing the response to send to the NYPD. For his work, he earned as much as $1,000 a month and goodwill from the police after a string of minor marijuana arrests.

………

Rahman said he now believes his work as an informant against Muslims in New York was “detrimental to the Constitution.” After he disclosed to friends details about his work for the police — and after he told the police that he had been contacted by the AP — he stopped receiving text messages from his NYPD handler, “Steve,” and his handler’s NYPD phone number was disconnected.

………

The programs were built with unprecedented help from the CIA.

Two thoughts:

• The US Attorneys whose jurisdiction covers the greater New York City area won’t do a thing to look into this. 
• Shamiur Rachman has announced his intention to move to the Caribbean.  He’d better move now, because he’s going to get 12 years for jaywalking if he stays in the United States.

And this time, it’s to ensure that absolutely no one will ever reveal who amongst us are the torturers:

Bmaz just wrote a long post talking about the dilemma John Kiriakou faces as the government and his defense lawyers attempt to get him to accept a plea deal rather than go to trial for leaking the names of people–Thomas Donahue Fletcher and Deuce Martinez–associated with the torture program.

I’d like to look at four more aspects of this case:

• The timing of this plea deal–reflecting a realization on the part of DOJ that their efforts to shield Fletcher would fail
• CIA’s demand for a head
• The improper cession of a special counsel investigation to the US Attorney for Eastern Virginia
• The ongoing efforts to cover-up torture

………

The CIA panicked because the subjects of CIA torture were learning the identities of their torturers. DOJ did an investigation to see whether any crime had been committed, and determined it hadn’t. CIA then started politicizing that decision, which led to Fitzgerald’s appointment.

Fitzgerald confirmed what DOJ originally determined: the defense attorneys committed no crime by researching who their clients’ torturers were.

But along the way Fitzgerald gave the CIA a head–John Kiriakou’s–based partly on old investigations of him. And, surprise surprise, that head happens to belong to the only CIA officer who publicly broke the omerta about the torture program.

This entire case was an attempt to punish someone to restore the omerta on CIA’s illegal activities.

For a bigger picture, I would recommend Dan Froomkin’s analysis of the Obama administration’s war on whistle blower.

Our country desperately needs to enshrine the Swedish concept of Offentlighetsprincipen (openness) into our constitution, and soon, or our representative democracy is going to quickly turn into a sham.

He died today, at age 90.  (George McGovern died, not my dad)

He was a better man on every level than Richard Nixon, and would have made a better President.

As depressing as it sounds, I think that Nixon might very well have been a better President than all of those that proceeded him.

He was certainly better than the overwhelming majority of them.

That is a scary thought.

It’s Darrell Issa, the gift that keeps on giving, who just released documents on Libya without redacting source names, putting them at risk:

House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) compromised the identities of several Libyans working with the U.S. government and placed their lives in danger when he released reams of State Department communications Friday, according to Obama administration officials.

Issa posted 166 pages of sensitive but unclassified State Department communications related to Libya on the committee’s website afternoon as part of his effort to investigate security failures and expose contradictions in the administration’s statements regarding the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi that resulted in the death of Amb. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.

“The American people deserve nothing less than a full explanation from this administration about these events, including why the repeated warnings about a worsening security situation appear to have been ignored by this administration. Americans also deserve a complete explanation about your administration’s decision to accelerate a normalized presence in Libya at what now appears to be at the cost of endangering American lives,” Issa and Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) wrote today in a letter to President Barack Obama.

It appears that the entire Valarie Plame thing was not an aberration. Republicans are confronted with a conflict between politics and national security, they will go with politics, even if it only delays a document release by a couple of days.

Issa is a f%$#ing piece of work, but any examination of his life story would show that.

The US Court of Appeals for the 2^nd circuit has ruled that DOMA was unconstitutional.

What’s more they set a very high standard:

This is a really big deal. Jacobs is not simply saying that DOMA imposes unique and unconstitutional burdens on gay couples, he is saying that any attempt by government to discriminate against gay people must have an “exceedingly persuasive” justification. This is the same very skeptical standard afforded to laws that discriminate against women. If Jacobs’ reasoning is adopted by the Supreme Court, it will be a sweeping victory for gay rights, likely causing state discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation to be virtually eliminated. And the fact that this decision came from such a conservative judge makes it all the more likely that DOMA will ultimately be struck down by the Supreme Court.

Of course, this won’t make any difference to Scalia when it gets there. He’s a corrupt hack.

Still, it’s a, dare I say it, a fabulous bit of news.

And the number sucks.

It ain’t a swing state, so I don’t have any qualms about not voting for the guy who appointed Eric “Place” Holder.

The title of Marcy Wheeler’s post says it all, “Eric Holder Rewards the Teams that Gave Torturers and Mortgage Fraudsters Immunity“.

Disgraceful.

So, Scott Brown accuses Elizabeth Warren of doing the Elizabeth Warren of working for the asbestos companies, and she responds with an ad with families of the victims of mesothelioma.

His response is to accuse her of using actors in the ad, which is completely untrue:

U.S. Sen. Scott Brown suggested Wednesday that his Democratic opponent Elizabeth Warren used actors in her advertisements defending the legal work she did on asbestos-related lawsuits.

But three of the people in the advertisements have said that’s not the case.

Brown made the statement during a campaign stop at the Taunton Fire Department’s central station on Wednesday morning.

During a question and answer session, one firefighter commented that both campaigns are publishing advertisements featuring family members of victims of asbestos-related illness. He asked Brown how Warren gets the victims’ family members to go on her commercial.

“A lot of them are paid,” Brown said. “We hear that maybe they pay actors. Listen, you can get surrogates and go out and say your thing. We have regular people in our commercials. No one is paid. They are regular folks that reach out to us and say she is full of it.”

One of the ads, titled “Ashamed,” features Kingston resident Ginny Jackson, whose husband died of mesothelioma after working at a Quincy shipyard that was filled with asbestos.

Reached through the Warren campaign, Jackson responded to Brown’s comments, calling them offensive.

“What Scott Brown said today is so offensive to me and my family after what we went through,” Jackson said. “He’s sunk to a new low.”

Nope, this is the nature of the Massachusetts Republican Party.

It’s who they are.

You should not be shocked.

H/t Wonkette.