• In Minneapolis, the New York Times turns up «a fascinating, heartbreaking, and ultimately, important story» of povery, terrorism, Somalia, teenagers, Facebook, and oddly enough, the building used to depict Mary Richard’s later apartment on the Mary Tyler Moore Show back in the 1970s, all of which may add up to the “most significant domestic terrorism investigation since Sept. 11,” 2001.
• On PBS, «Bill Moyers has a bull session with the former corporate communications director of Cigna Health Care, Wendell Potter», who describes his come-to-Jesus moment in Wise County, Virginia, where he was faced with the truth about his industry and what it has to American health care. A full video of the session, plus word-for-word transcript, is available and should be watched by every American, especially Barack Obama.
i• In Washington state, «brother and sister recant» 20-year-old claims of sexual abuse that sent their father to prison; brother tells judge “he made the allegation after months of insistent questioning by now-retired Clark County sheriff’s detective Sharon Krause just so she would leave him alone.” Krause allegedly gave the sister ice cream; that cone put daddy in prison for 20 years and slapped a sex offender label on him that is proving hard to scrape off.
• In Anchorage, the Crazy Train continues puffing up the tracks as soon-to-be-former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin «announces she will campaign for anyone who will have her» (including conservative Democrats) and that even her own son is not a Republican (he’s “unaffiliated” like his daddy, meaning, one assumes, a member of the Alaskan Independence Party, which, among other things, “advocates an in-state referendum which includes the option of Alaska becoming an independent nation,” according to its website).
• In Washington, D.C., it was revealed that «Dick Cheney ordered the concealment from Congress of a CIA counterterrorism program» and that Attorney General Eric Holder is contemplating opening a criminal probe of possible CIA torture. President Obama is sticking to his “let’s move forward stance” and appears worried that healthcare reform will be “derailed by partisan bickering over torture.”
• In Los Angeles, «LaToya Jackson believes she knows» who the real killers are.
• Yale University Press produces a book called Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, which reveals that «Ernest Hemingway was “for a while on the KGB’s list of its agents in America”». The book is co-written by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev, and is “based on notes that Vassiliev, a former KGB officer, made when he was given access in the 90s to Stalin-era intelligence archives in Moscow.” The book apparently has no definitive answer to the main question posed in the article: “Was he only ever a pseudo-spook, possibly seeing his clandestine dealings as potential literary material, or a genuine but hopelessly ineffective one?”
Another fabulous summer week in America!