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Michael Mukasey, President George W. Bush’s last attorney general, has added his voice to a growing conservative chorus of condemnation against Liz Cheney’s attacks on Department of Justice lawyers who represented Guantanamo Bay detainees. In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal , Mukasey argues that an ad from Keep America Safe, the pressure group headed by former Vice President Dick Cheney’s daughter, is part of a “shoddy and dangerous” trend of politicizing the work of lawyers. “It is plainly prudent for us to assure that no government lawyers are bringing to their public jobs any agenda driven by views other than those that would permit full-hearted enforcement of laws,” Mukasey wrote. “But that prudence is not properly exercised by arguing that lawyers who defended drug cases, or worked on defense teams in death-penalty cases, or helped bring legal proceedings in behalf of those detained as terrorists, are automatically to be identified with their former clients and regarded as a fifth column within the Justice Department.” Mukasey drew parallels between the attacks on what Keep America Safe calls the ” Al Qaeda Seven ” to the controversy swirling over torture memo authors Jay Bybee and John Yoo. The former attorney general argued that attracting good lawyers to the Justice Department means bringing in people who have worked on controversial cases. Story continues below… “If the Department of Justice comes to attract only lawyers who have spent their professional energy principally in avoiding matters of controversy, the quality of lawyers willing to serve at the department will decline, and the department will suffer, as will we all,” Mukasey concluded. Mukasey’s voice is the latest among conservatives to criticize the Keep America Safe campaign, which has attracted plenty of coverage in the mainstream media. The New York Times noted on Tuesday that even Yoo himself objected to the campaign, though for different reasons than Mukasey’s. “What’s the big whoop?” Yoo asked, as quoted at the Times . “The Constitution makes the president the chief law enforcement officer. We had an election. President Obama has softer policies on terror than his predecessor.” Yoo added that the president “can and should put people into office who share his views,” and the public can then “decide whether they agree with him or not.” Earlier this week, 19 former members of the Bush administration signed a letter condemning Liz Cheney’s group for launching the attack. Among the signatories was Ken Starr, the lawyer known best for his turn as special prosecutor investigating the Clinton administration. “This was very unwise, and really an out-of-bounds characterization and challenge to good, honorable lawyers,” Starr said on MSNBC’s Countdown With Keith Olbermann . He called the ads “unfortunate” and “ill-conceived.” South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham also attacked the Keep America Safe ad. “This system of justice that we’re so proud of in America requires the unpopular to have an advocate and every time a defense lawyer fights to make the government do their job, that defense lawyer has made us all safer,” he told The Cable .

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The battle over health care reform is not only pitting liberals against conservatives but also stirring up old feuds on the left. In an appearance Tuesday on MSNBC’s Countdown, Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas criticized Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s threat to vote against health care reform legislation as “a very Ralph Nader-esque approach to politics” and indicated that he would consider such a vote to be legitimate grounds for a primary challenge. “It’s not perfect,” Moulitsas said of the current health care legislation, “but it’s a first step, and God knows it’s taken us a long time to even get our toe in the door. … If somebody like Kucinich wants to block that, I find that completely reprehensible.” In an appearance on Countdown the previous night, Kucinich had called the current bill “a giveaway to the insurance industry” and reaffirmed his position that he “couldn’t support the bill if it didn’t have a robust public option and at least if it didn’t have something that was going to protect consumers from these rampant premium increases.” “If that sounded like a no [vote], you’re correct,” Kucinich told guest host Lawrence O’Donnell. Story continues below… “Ralph Nader paved the way for eight years of George Bush,” Moulitsas explained to O’Donnell on Tuesday, referring to Nader’s third-party campaign for president in 2000. “I’m going to hold people like Dennis Kucinich responsible for the 40,000 Americans that die each year from a lack of health care.” “Is it reprehensible enough to mount a primary challenge against him?” O’Donnell asked. “Is it possible to be too liberal?” “Absolutely,” Moulitsas responded. “I don’t think he gets a pass. I don’t care what his excuse is. … He”s not elected to grandstand and to give us his ideal utopian society. … He’s not representing the uninsured constituents in his district by pretending to take the high ground here. … I think that’s the perfect excuse and rationale for a primary challenge.” Animosity from Moulitsas towards Kucinich goes back many years. In early 2007, when the possibility of a Kucinich presidential campaign was being raised, the blogger wrote, “When talking about Kucinich, I usually leave it at ‘ugh’. I’ve found that much kinder than actually getting into Kucinich’s record.” He then proceeded to sum up a decade’s worth of attacks on Kucinich’s more utopian positions, concluding, “He used his 2004 run for president to score dates. Luckily, he’s married this time around so we’ll be spared that pathetic display of desperation.” Moulitsas himself, however, might be accused of empty grandstanding on this occasion, since — in the words of an ascerbic post by blogger David Dayen at FireDogLake — there is “one flaw in the brilliant plan.” “The Ohio primary takes place on May 4, and the filing deadline for candidates was February 18,” Dayen notes. “Kucinich has no Democratic challenger. … In addition, as Markos well knows (and I don’t blame him for being baited into an answer about a primary challenge which is physically impossible; Lawrence O’Donnell needs a researcher) it’s pretty difficult putting together a primary challenge. … In fact, they often take multiple cycles.” But one diarist at Daily Kos reacted with far greater dismay to the attack on Kucinich, calling it, “the night the left in America died.” “It looks like the purge of the left and the final push for the corporate-care insurance bill is on,” writes poplist2003. “Topping it all off was the astonishing attack on Dennis Kucinich tonight by Markos on the Countdown show, culminating in a call for a primary challenge (presumably by a nice centrist corporate ‘Democrat’ – how about Harold Ford?) to Kucinich. (Would Keith have tee’d up that assault the way that Lawrence O’Donnell did?) … The bill itself is bad enough. But what is truly tragic is the way that nominally progressive entities are turning on the most progressive members of their own party.” This video is from MSNBC’s Countdown , broadcast March 9, 2010. Download video via RawReplay.com

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They plan to become doctors, researchers and professors, but these students from Liberty University, an evangelical school, also believe God created the Earth in a week, some 6,000 years ago. Each year, a group of biology students at the Christian university based in Lynchburg, Virginia, travels to the Natural History Museum in Washington to learn about a theory they dismiss as incorrect — Darwin’s theory of evolution. The young “creationists” examined a model of the Morganucodon rat, believed to be the first and common ancestor of mammals that appeared some 210 million years ago. Lauren Dunn, 19, a second-year biology student, was unimpressed. “210 million years, that’s arbitrary. They put that time to make up for what they don’t know,” she said. Story continues below… Nathan Hubbard, a 20-year-old from Michigan and a first-year biology major who plans to become a doctor, regarded the model with suspicion. “There is no scientific, biological genetic way that this, this rat, could become you,” he said, seemingly scandalized by the proposition. Liberty University is the most prominent evangelical university in the United States, with some 12,000 students who adhere to strict rules and regulations regarding moral conduct. Its biology curriculum includes a course on “Young Earth Creationism”, which juxtaposes Charles Darwin’s “Origin of the Species” with the Book of Genesis. “In order to be the best creationist, you have to be the best evolutionist you can be,” said Marcus Ross, who teaches paleontology and says of Adam and Eve: “I feel they were real people, they were the first people.” David DeWitt, a Liberty University biology professor, opens his classes with a prayer, asking God to help him teach his students. “I pray that you help me to teach effectively and help the students to learn and defend their faith,” he says. Strongly-expressed faith is not unusual in the United States, a country where 80 percent of the population claim to believe in God and ascribe to established religions. Polls taken in the last two years found that between 44 and 46 percent of Americans believe that the Earth was created in a week, somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago. Creationism, an increasingly popular theory in the United States and elsewhere in the world, rejects Darwin’s theory that all living species evolved over the course of billions of years via the process of natural selection. The school of thought has adherents among Jehovah’s Witnesses and some fundamentalist Muslims, but in the United States it has won most converts in the evangelical Christian community. Former president George W. Bush, a born-again Christian, is among those who say evolutionary theory does not fully explain the Earth’s creation, though the ex-president also noted he is not a “literalist” when it comes to the Bible. Creationist belief has implications for the way people understand a variety of fields, including biology, paleontology and astronomy, but also impacts questions about climate change and educational debates. At the Smithsonian Institute, among crowds of weekend visitors, the Liberty University students visited the evolution exhibition,. But Darwin’s explanation for why giraffes have long necks — that they evolved over time so they could reach higher foliage — and displays of fossil evidence failed to sway them. “Creationism and evolutionism have different ways of explaining the evidence. The creationist way recognizes the importance of Biblical records,” said Ross. He teaches his students that dinosaurs were wiped from the face of the Earth some 4,000 to 5,000 years ago during the Biblical flood that Noah survived by building an ark. He says carbon-dating techniques that have been used to suggest the Earth is in fact billions of years old are simply not reliable. He doesn’t reject one prominent theory that dinosaurs were wiped out by a massive asteroid that collided into Earth, but suggests the collision coincided with the Biblical flood. Though Ross acknowledges that the United States is among the most welcoming environments in the world for creationists, he said it can be difficult to convince people to take him and his beliefs seriously. “The attitude is when you are a creationist you are ignorant of the facts,” he said.

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Rep. Eric Massa became somewhat of a conservative hero Monday after he accused Democratic leadership of forcing him to resign because he wouldn’t support the health care reform bill. But a highly anticipated interview with the former congressman left Glenn Beck apologizing Tuesday. In a Sunday radio talk, Massa claimed that he was guilty of using “salty language” but that he had done nothing else wrong. Roll Call reported that the then-congressman had suggested that he should be having sex with a male staffer. “On New Year’s Eve, I went to a staff party. It was actually a wedding for a staff member of mine; there were over 250 people there. I was with my wife. And in fact we had a great time. She got the stomach flu,” he said. Massa explained that he then danced first with the bride, who was not identified, and then with a bridesmaid. He said multiple cameras recorded the incident. “I said goodnight to the bridesmaid,” Massa continued. “I sat down at the table where my whole staff was, all of them by the way bachelors.” Story continues below… “One of them looked at me and as they would do after, I don’t know, 15 gin and tonics, and goodness only knows how many bottles of champagne, a staff member made an intonation to me that maybe I should be chasing after the bridesmaid and his points were clear and his words were far more colorful than that,” Massa said. “And I grabbed the staff member sitting next to me and said, ‘Well, what I really ought to be doing is frakking you.’ And then [I] tossled the guy’s hair and left, went to my room, because I knew the party was getting to a point where it wasn’t right for me to be there. Now was that inappropriate of me? Absolutely. Am I guilty? Yes.” But a Tuesday report in the Washington Post said that Massa was being investigated for “groping” multiple staffers. The allegations surrounding the former lawmaker date back at least a year, and involve “a pattern of behavior and physical harassment,” according to one source. The new claims of alleged groping contradict statements by Massa, who resigned his office on Monday after it became public that he was the subject of a House ethics committee investigation for possible harassment… According to two sources familiar with the probe, Massa’s former deputy chief of staff Ron Hikel provided the information about the staffers’ allegations to the House ethics committee three weeks ago. Hikel had earlier sought advice from Majority Leader Steny Hoyer’s office about brewing internal complaints, the sources said, and had been urged to report the allegations to the committee. In the same radio address, Massa tried to point the blame for his resignation at Rahm Emanuel and the Democrats. “You think that somehow they didn’t come after me to get rid of me because my vote is the deciding vote in the health care bill?” Massa said. “Then, ladies and gentlemen, you live today in a world that is so innocent as to not understand what’s going on in Washington, D.C.” But in Tuesday’s interview with Glenn Beck, Massa seemed to back off his allegations. “I wasn’t forced out. I forced myself out. I failed. I didn’t live up to my own codes. I own this. I take full and complete responsibility for my misbehavior,” said Massa. Beck, apparently expecting Massa to provide details of Democratic corruption, apologized to his viewers. “America, I’m going to shoot straight with you. I think I’ve wasted your time. I think this is the first time I have wasted an hour of your time, and I apologize for that,” said Beck. In the same interview, Massa described inappropriate tickle fights that took place while he was living with several of his aides. Massa agreed that the tickle fights were “groping” but said it was non-sexual, according to The New York Times “I did nothing sexual,” he said. “Now they are saying I groped a male staffer,” he told Mr. Beck. “Yeah, I did. Not only did I grope him. I tickled him until he couldn’t breathe, and then four guys jumped on top of me. It was my 50th birthday. It was kill the old guy. You can take anything out of context.” Mr. Massa suggested he had been warned about how his conduct was being perceived. “My chief of staff had a conniption and said: ‘You can’t live there; it’s not Congressional,’ ” he said. Mr. Massa, who is married, explained that he and his aides — “all bachelors” — lived together because they could not afford the rents in Washington. Hours later while talking to Larry King, Massa seemed to take back the groping admission. “No, it is not true, period. I don’t know how else to answer your question,” he told King. “Are you gay,” asked King. “Here’s my answer, I’m not going to answer that. In the year 2010? Why don’t you ask my wife, ask my friends. Ask the 10,000 sailors I served with in the Navy,” responded Massa. “It insults every gay American. Why would anyone ask that question?” he wondered. This video is from MSNBC’s Countdown , broadcast March 9, 2010. Download video via RawReplay.com

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Progressive firebrand Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) isn’t giving up on offering Americans a public option. The congressman on Tuesday introduced the four-page H.R. 4789 “Public Option Act,” also called the “Medicare You Can Buy Into Act,” would allow all legal American residents under 65 to enroll in Medicare by paying a fee. He made a passionate call for a vote on the floor of the House. “The government spent billions of dollars creating a Medicare network of providers that is only open to one-eighth of the population,” Grayson said. “That’s like saying, ‘Only people 65 and over can use federal highways.’  It is a waste of a very valuable resource and it is not fair.  This idea is simple, it makes sense, and it deserves an up-or-down vote.” The inclusion of a public option in the larger Democratic health care legislation has been a topic of immense debate. The Senate dropped the proposal in December and the final package is unlikely to include it. A Medicare buy-in option was also briefly considered but didn’t survive. The Florida freshman described the “adversarial relationship” he had with his insurance company when his bills skyrocketed during the birth of his twins, who were born early and spent months in the hospital. He said many Americans face similar problems, and that “every penny they spent on my care was a penny less for their profits.” Story continues below… “America needs a public option,” he declared, lamenting the lack of competition in the private insurance industry. “That’s why I’ve introduced this bill.” Seeking to clear up any doubts about the proposal, Grayson noted that it’s “not a plan for subsidies” as “everyone would have to pay their own costs.” He labeled insurance companies as “the real death panels in this country” due to their widely-documented practices of denying care due to people with pre-existing conditions and rescinding coverage from sick patients. The idea of expanding public health insurance has been highly controversial in Congress, with Republicans offering unanimous opposition and conservative Democrats reluctant to support it. “I say to those people on the other side of the aisle, if you don’t want to buy into the public option, but don’t prevent me and my family and the ones who I love from doing the same,” Grayson said. “Let us have our alternative.” The video is Grayson’s speech on the House floor Tuesday, uploaded to YouTube.

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