Things We Pretty Much Knew Already (A Continuing Series)

Yeah, just when you thought I'd given up blogging after the Obama election. Truth is, I've had the Mother Of All Chest Colds, which I'm still not completely over after 6 weeks, and getting better ranked higher on my list than blogging. Imagine.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah...

A bipartisan Senate report(pdf) released today says that former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other top Bush administration officials are directly responsible for abuses of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and charges that decisions by those officials led to serious offenses against prisoners in Iraq and elsewhere.

Meanwhile, how is that whole 'defending our borders from illegal immigrants' thing going?

Every few weeks for nearly four years, the Secret Service screened the IDs of employees for a Maryland cleaning company before they entered the house of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, the nation's top immigration official.

The company's owner says the workers sailed through the checks -- although some of them turned out to be illegal immigrants.

Now, owner James D. Reid finds himself in a predicament that he considers especially confounding. In October, he was fined $22,880 after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigators said he failed to check identification and work documents and fill out required I-9 verification forms for employees, five of whom he said were part of crews sent to Chertoff's home and whom ICE told him to fire because they were undocumented.

Yeah, that's what I thought.

January 20th can't come soon enough.

Speaking of which, how about that crazy idea of appointing a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and energy researcher to head the Department of Energy? It's about time.