Imagine this: in a week when the latest presidential campaign finance reports reveal a growing list of million-dollar donors to super PACs, right-wing bloggers and Republican lawyers are defending the Supreme Court’s controversial 2010 Citizens United decisions as maligned by media and of course, liberals.

The apologists are saying there’s nothing corrupt going on; it wasn’t caused byCitizen Unitedanyway; it’s people not corporations writing the checks; it’s only free speech; it’s always been done; and it’s good for democracy.

Let’s unmask these silly assertions one by one. It might come as a shock to the right, but Americans who care about democracy can see through their charade.

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jonathan-cunningham:

I unlinked my arms voluntarily and informed the LAPD officers that I would go peacefully and cooperatively. I stood as instructed, and then I had my arms wrenched behind my back, and an officer hyperextended my wrists into my inner arms. It was super violent, it hurt really really bad, and he was doing it on purpose. When I involuntarily recoiled from the pain, the LAPD officer threw me face-first to the pavement. He had my hands behind my back, so I landed right on my face. The officer dropped with his knee on my back and ground my face into the pavement. It really, really hurt and my face started bleeding and I was very scared. I begged for mercy and I promised that I was honestly not resisting and would not resist.

My hands were then zipcuffed very tightly behind my back, where they turned blue. I am now suffering nerve damage in my right thumb and palm.

I was put on a paddywagon with other nonviolent protestors and taken to a parking garage in Parker Center. They forced us to kneel on the hard pavement of that parking garage for seven straight hours with our hands still tightly zipcuffed behind our backs. Some began to pass out. One man rolled to the ground and vomited for a long, long time before falling unconscious. The LAPD officers watched and did nothing.

At 9 a.m. we were finally taken from the pavement into the station to be processed. The charge was sitting in the park after the police said not to. It’s a misdemeanor. Almost always, for a misdemeanor, the police just give you a ticket and let you go. It costs you a couple hundred dollars. Apparently, that’s what happened with most every other misdemeanor arrest in LA that day.

With us Occupy LA protestors, however, they set bail at $5,000 and booked us into jail. Almost none of the protesters could afford to bail themselves out. I’m lucky and I could afford it, except the LAPD spent all day refusing to actually *accept* the bail they set. If you were an accused murderer or a rapist in LAPD custody that day, you could bail yourself right out and be back on the street, no problem. But if you were a nonviolent Occupy LA protestor with bail money in hand, you were held long into the following morning, with absolutely no access to a lawyer.

I spent most of my day and night crammed into an eight-man jail cell, along with sixteen other Occupy LA protesters. My sleeping spot was on the floor next to the toilet.

Finally, at 2:30 the next morning, after twenty-five hours in custody, I was released on bail. But there were at least 200 Occupy LA protestors who couldn’t afford the bail. The LAPD chose to keep those peaceful, non-violent protesters in prison for two full days… the absolute legal maximum that the LAPD is allowed to detain someone on misdemeanor charges.

As a reminder, Antonio Villaraigosa has referred to all of this as “the LAPD’s finest hour.”

Thank God news outlets like NPR are all over what happened there that day. Here’s what NPR has to say about it:

In the end, there was very little force used, in part because this is a new LAPD. It exercises much more restraint than it once did

Thank God for NPR, or we might actually learn about what the LAPD did to Occupy LA!

While the United States, Britain and Canada are planning to announce a coordinated set of sanctions against Iran’s oil and petrochemical industry today, longtime investigative journalist Seymour Hersh questions the growing consensus on Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program. International pressure has been mounting on Iran since the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency revealed in a report the “possible military dimensions” to Iran’s nuclear activities, citing “credible” evidence that “indicates that Iran has carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device.” In his latest article for The New Yorker blog, titled “Iran and the IAEA,” Hersh argues the recent report is a “political document,” not a scientific study. “They [JSOC] found nothing. Nothing. No evidence of any weaponization,” Hersh says. “In other words, no evidence of a facility to build the bomb. They have facilities to enrich, but not separate facilities to build the bomb. This is simply a fact.”

In which I listen to the reactions of Beck, Hannity, Savage, et al. regarding the demise of Osama Bin Laden — so you don’t have to…

1) All the credit should go to Bush.

2) All the credit should go to Cheney.

3) All the credit should go to Giuliani.

4) All the credit should go to Rumsfeld.

#5-#10 after the jump…

5) All the credit should go to the military and CIA, whose budgets must now be increased.

6) All the credit should go to the enhanced interrogators without whose enhanced interrogation we would never have found OBL.

7) Obama better not try to take any credit because that would be politicizing a great patriotic event.

8) How dare Osama, I mean Obama, bury Obama, I mean Osama, at sea, rather than putting his head on a pike in the Rose Garden with a webcam so we can watch crows pick his eyes out?

9) The religious burial rites show that Sharia Law has superseded the Constitution.

10) The only appropriate music for such occasions is crappy, jingoistic Country music.

And an Honorable Mention for the most backhanded compliment goes to Michael Savage: “Maybe it takes a radical Marxist to kill an Islamic terrorist.”

(Crossposted from http://www.sampratt.com)

Another sub-theme I neglected to mention: Look—over there—Iran is about to get nukes! We better take out Ahmedinajad, too.