Rice makes an apology for the torture:

In an interview with the al Arabiya television network, a regional network broadcast from the United Arab Emirates, Rice expressed sorrow about the treatment of the Iraqi detainees and said the United States regrets the humiliation caused to Iraqi detainees and their families. “The American president is reacting because no American wants to be associated with any dehumanizations now of the Iraqi people. We are deeply sorry for what has happened to these people and what the families must be feeling. It’s just not right. And we will get to the bottom of what happened,” Rice said.

And Bush is “shaken“:

In a rare expression of disappointment with any aspect of the war in Iraq, President Bush told a group of regional reporters yesterday that he was “shaken” by the reports of prisoner abuse in Iraq “because I know this doesn’t reflect the values of our country.”

Good:

Patrons at about 75 Wisconsin strip clubs are being asked to forget about the barely dressed, gyrating dancers long enough to register to vote. Club owners are posting signs, handing out forms and even providing envelopes and stamps – anything to get customers to register.

And some club-goers are listening. Joe Herbrand, of Janesville, recently filled out a voter registration form at The Isabella Queen between Janesville and Beloit. “I was pretty amped about the situation,” the 23-year-old said. “I’ve never been asked if I want to vote.”

On a similar topic, over spring break I got the chance to hear Granny D speak and she mentioned having stopped into a strip club to ask a few women to vote – and having come out having inspired a new website: Exotic Women Vote.

More bad news for the poor and their allies:

New York City is facing a shortfall of at least $55.5 million in federal housing subsidies this year because of a recent regulatory change affecting the government’s primary housing program for poor Americans. The change, retroactive to January, stems from an effort by the Bush administration to control spiraling housing costs. In the past, the federal government paid the full cost of the 1.9 million rent vouchers given to poor tenants nationwide to help them pay for housing under the Section 8 program. But on April 22, the Department of Housing and Urban Development told housing agencies that it would pay only the cost of a voucher as of last August, plus an inflation adjustment.

The change could affect more than 900 of the nation’s 2,500 public housing agencies, particularly those in cities where rent increases outpace inflation, according to the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials. New York City housing officials say that historically, the local cost of providing vouchers has gone up faster than inflation.

FAIR asks what happened to the coverage of the March for Women’s Lives:

A Nexis search of the week surrounding the women’s march found a total of six stories from the broadcast networks (not counting incidental mentions of the march): CBS ran one story the day of the march and two the next morning; NBC ran two stories and ABC only one, all on April 25. CNN, as a 24-hour cable news outlet, gave more extensive coverage to the event, running several reports on Sunday. But even CNN failed to treat the march as the historic occasion that it was, running just a small handful of brief march-related stories on Saturday and Monday.

To put the women’s march coverage in perspective, FAIR conducted a similar Nexis search of the week surrounding the Promise Keepers march in 1997. The Promise Keepers, an evangelical men’s organization that has been widely accused of promoting misogyny and homophobia, drew an estimated 480,000-750,000 demonstrators to Washington– roughly three-quarters the size of the women’s march. Despite its somewhat smaller size, the Promise Keepers received much more media attention: Stories began appearing on network news three days before the march and continued for two days afterward, with a total of 19 stories between the three broadcast networks– more than three times the coverage the networks devoted to the women’s march. Was the Promise Keepers march three times more newsworthy than the March for Women’s Lives?

Greg Palast, who knows this beat better than anyone, writes in The Nation about Bush’s campaign to steal the election all over again:

…HAVA not only blesses such purges, it requires all fifty states to implement a similar search-and-destroy mission against vulnerable voters. Specifically, every state must, by the 2004 election, imitate Florida’s system of computerizing voter files. The law then empowers fifty secretaries of state–fifty Katherine Harrises–to purge these lists of “suspect” voters.

The purge is back, big time. Following the disclosure in December 2000 of the black voter purge in Britain’s Observer newspaper, NAACP lawyers sued the state. The civil rights group won a written promise from Governor Jeb and from Harris’s successor to return wrongly scrubbed citizens to the voter rolls. According to records given to the courts by ChoicePoint, the company that generated the computerized lists, the number of Floridians who were questionably tagged totals 91,000…

Mother Jones asks what McCain-Feingold has changed – and what it hasn’t.

Astroturf organizing:

The town-hall appearances are not exactly free-ranging sessions with a cross-section of voters. Instead, they will permit people who have benefited from the president’s tax-cut policies to ask him questions.

The American Commander calls for general-officer memoranda of reprimand against six prison supervisors for the torture of Iraqi prisoners.

Meanwhile, on FOX News, a former sergeant and intrrogation instructor, with Sean Hannity’s approval, makes light of the abuse:

ROBINSON: I’ve seen — I’ve seen worse than this at — frat hazing is worse than this.

ROBINSON: Well, it’s not torture. If it was, they’d be accused of torture. They’re accused of maltreatment. I’m not making excuses for them.

Those prescription drug discounts – not all they’re cracked up to be:

Prices for Lipitor, Celebrex and other popular brand-name medicines offered by Medicare’s new drug discount cards are no better than those that consumers can find, without discounts, from online pharmacies. The drugs are cheaper still in Canada.

Medicare began posting drug prices on its Web site yesterday, allowing people to compare the new Medicare-approved discount drug cards and decide which offer the best prices. Mark McClellan, administrator of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said consumers can find “significant price reductions off typical retail prices.” Democrats said the savings claimed by the administration would be eaten up by drug price increases that far outpace inflation.

Check out a new website tracking and rebutting the right-wing media machine by the man who knows it best.

From Agence France Press:

The US military knew troops had abused Iraqi prisoners for months before graphic, humiliating photographs surfaced last week, a journalist who read a US army report says. “There were three investigations, each by a major general of the army,” Seymour Hersh told CNN’s “Late Edition. “Clearly somebody at a higher level understood there were generic problems.” Hersh published his article in The New Yorker, based on an army investigation by Major General Antonio Taguba, which was not intended for public release. “Specifically, Taguba found that between October and December of 2003 there were numerous instances of ‘sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses’ at Abu Ghraib,” a US-run prison in Baghdad. Hersh said the abuses went far beyond those portrayed in the widely broadcast photographs of sexual abuse, nudity and humiliation that have angered the Arab world. They were first shown on CBS television’s “60 Minutes II.” The army investigation resulted in discipline and courts-martial for troops involved.

However, the 53-page report also made it clear that the troops would not have attempted to break down prisoners in this way, Hersh said, unless higher-ups or intelligence agents wanted them to soften the prisoners up for later to interrogation, or, euphemistically, to “set the conditions” for the session.