Much of the information in the report is new to the public, but a lot of it would have been uncovered during a detailed torture investigation Attorney General Eric Holder conducted during President Obama's first term. After carefully examining the evidence, Holder decided not to prosecute anyone for the CIA's torture. "The department has declined prosecution because the admissible evidence would not be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt," Holder said when he dropped investigations into two torture-related deaths in 2012.

That seems consistent with Obama's own views on the subject. Asked about investigating CIA torture in 2009, Obama replied that "it’s important to look forward and not backwards." Obama admitted that "we tortured some folks" earlier this year, but he didn't call for those responsible to be punished.

But the Obama administration has had a different attitude when it comes to those who revealed the existence of the CIA torture program. In 2012, the Obama administration charged former CIA official John Kiriakou for leaking classified information related to the torture program to reporters. Threatened with decades in prison, Kiriakou was forced to plead guilty and accept a 30-month prison sentence. He's in prison right now.

Obama has vowed to "use my authority as president to make sure we never resort to those methods again." But prosecuting people who revealed the program, instead of the people responsible, makes it more likely that abuses like this will happen again.

http://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/12/9/7361667/senate-torture-report-kiriakou

ObamaCare author Tom Harkin: Health law is 'really complicated'

By Alexander Bolton
The Hill, December 3, 2014

Sen. Tom Harkin, one of the co-authors of the Affordable Care Act, now thinks Democrats may have been better off not passing it at all and holding out for a better bill. The Iowa Democrat who chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, laments the complexity of legislation the Senate passed five years ago.
...

“We had the power to do it in a way that would have simplified healthcare, made it more efficient and made it less costly and we didn’t do it,” Harkin told The Hill. “So I look back and say we should have either done it the correct way or not done anything at all.
...

He believes Congress should have enacted “single-payer right from the get-go or at least put a public option would have simplified a lot.” “We had the votes to do that and we blew it,” he said.

Harkin and other liberals are now faced with the bitter irony that the centrists he tried to placate five years ago by crafting a labyrinthine market-based reform are now all out of the Senate.

http://www.pnhp.org/news/2014/december/tom-harkin-says-that-congress-should-have-enacted-single-payer

http://m.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/industry-news/energy-and-resources/green-energy-sector-jobs-surpass-oil-sand-employment-total/article21859169/?service=mobile

Canada’s green energy sector has grown so quickly and has become such an important part of the economy that it now employs more people than the oil sands.

About $25-billion has been invested in Canada’s clean-energy sector in the past five years, and employment is up 37 per cent, according to a new report from climate think tank Clean Energy Canada to be released Tuesday. That means the 23,700 people who work in green energy organizations outnumber the 22,340 whose work relates to the oil sands, the report says.....

Not only does the oil industry still get more substantial subsidies, she said, it also eats up a good deal of the country’s diplomatic relations efforts – through the lobbying for the Keystone XL pipeline, for example.


.....

“The fact that foreign investors are coming to Canada to invest in our clean energy, tells us that we have a fantastic resource,” Ms. Smith said. “We need Bay Street to wake up and recognize this is where the puck is going.”

E.ON’s generation, upstream and global commodities units, the last of which includes trading, accounted for about 35% of its €9.32bn (£7.4bn) in earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation in 2013. Renewables and regulated businesses alone accounted for 54%.

E.ON will hold a news conference on Monday about its plans, which will include investing more in wind and solar power.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/dec/01/eon-splits-energy-renewables