Mid-day open thread

• Scott Horton has perhaps the best overview of Michael Mukasey's disgraceful testimony yesterday before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
• Horton compares George Bush's push to grant retroactive immunity for lawbreaking telecoms to the egregious sale of indulgences by Pope Leo X.
• Two reports from Asia Times depict the state of the Iraqi union.

  US soldiers are getting killed on a daily basis and so are Iraqi army and police officers. Infrastructure is destroyed. In a country that used to feed much of the Arab world, starvation is now the norm. It is ironic that Iraq was not half as bad during the 12 years of sanctions. Our liberation has pushed us into a state of unprecedented corruption.

• Unsurging
• Tom Engelhardt describes the resumption of air war in Iraq, and the indifference of the corporate media.

  The predictably devastating results of helicopters "bombarding" an urban neighborhood in a major Iraqi city, if reported at all, will be treated as just the normal "collateral damage" of war as we know it.

• Dana Priest reports on the record level of suicides among Iraq war veterans.
• The House Homeland Security Committee has turned up evidence showing that political appointees at FEMA and CDC tried to block the inclusion of scientific evidence about the toxicity of formaldehyde from a report on FEMA trailers. After a chief of toxicology in CDC protested the suppression of information, he was 'reassigned' from his post.
• Rising fuel prices have driven up the cost of food in Haiti to the point that many poor Haitians are forced to survive on mud cookies.
• George Bush has decided that fiscal responsibility requires cuts to Medicare.
• The Director of U.S. Fish and Wildlife continues to make excuses for not listing polar bears as an endangered species.
• The California salmon run looks to be in big trouble.
• As the Net Neutrality fight drags on, telecom donations to members of Congress have shifted heavily toward Democrats during the last year.