He’s right. Just click the Salon ad to read.

Click the image to go to Salon and read the whole thing.

Wow. Watch Jon tear conservative blowhard Bennett a new one on the topic of gay marriage.

This is what journalists should be like.

Remember HIPAA? The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, passed in 2003 and designed to give federal protection to our private medical information? Remember how the Department of Health and Human Services was supposed to enforce the law (we know, novel idea these days) and fine violators? Turns out — not so much.

In the three years since Americans gained federal protection for their private medical information, the Bush administration has received thousands of complaints alleging violations but has not imposed a single civil fine and has prosecuted just two criminal cases.

Of the 19,420 grievances lodged so far, the most common allegations have been that personal medical details were wrongly revealed, information was poorly protected, more details were disclosed than necessary, proper authorization was not obtained or patients were frustrated getting their own records.

The government has “closed” more than 73 percent of the cases — more than 14,000 — either ruling that there was no violation, or allowing health plans, hospitals, doctors’ offices or other entities simply to promise to fix whatever they had done wrong, escaping any penalty.

As DoubleSpeak guest John Aravosis said, it appears “we have no government. We have a tax-cutting war machine run by an incompetent moron.”

Rep. Patrick Kennedy is out of rehab and feeling good.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Rep. Patrick Kennedy has ended nearly a month of treatment for addiction to prescription pain drugs and had an appearance scheduled Monday in his home state of Rhode Island.

Kennedy left the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. on Friday.

“The congressman was discharged after completing his treatment at the Mayo Clinic,” said Kennedy chief of staff Sean Richardson. “He’s feeling great and he’s looking forward to getting back to work.”

Opening across the nation today, Al Gore’s all-important new film, An Inconvenient Truth:

The entire DoubleSpeak team will be seeing it this weekend and we’ll have more next week. Make your pledge to see the Truth now. Find a theater near you. And Take Action.

Cafferty: We all hope nothing happens to Arlen Specter, the Republican head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, cause he might be all that stands between us and a full blown dictatorship in this country. He’s vowed to question these phone company executives about volunteering to provide the government with my telephone records, and yours, and tens of millions of other Americans.

Shortly after 9/11, AT&T, Verizon, and BellSouth began providing the super-secret NSA with information on phone calls of millions of our citizens, all part of the War on Terror, President Bush says. Why don’t you go find Osama bin Laden, and seal the country’s borders, and start inspecting the containers that come into our ports?

The President rushed out this morning in the wake of this front page story in USA Today and declared the government is doing nothing wrong, and all this is just fine. Is it? Is it legal? Then why did the Justice Department suddenly drop its investigation of the warrantless spying on citizens because the NSA said Justice Department lawyers didn’t have the necessary security clearance to do the investigation. Read that sentence again. A secret government agency has told our Justice Department that it’s not allowed to investigate it. And the Justice Department just says ok and drops the whole thing. We’re in some serious trouble, boys and girls”

There’s an important paragraph to note in the USA Today article cited in our previous post.

Among the big telecommunications companies, only Qwest has refused to help the NSA, the sources said. According to multiple sources, Qwest declined to participate because it was uneasy about the legal implications of handing over customer information to the government without warrants.

Qwest did the right thing here and decided to protect its consumers’ interests over the government’s curiousity absent a court order. If the president had truly felt that this was a dire issue of national security, he would have gone to the FISA court and gotten a warrant or at the very least, compelled Qwest to comply through executive order. Verizon, BellSouth and AT&T chose to help the NSA with this illegal activity.