Tension grows between Calif. Muslims, FBI after informant infiltrates mosque

Follow the link. Really good interview on the topic. The interviewer also clearly did his homework, and asked some good questions. The Gist: What the Protests Mean for LGBT Egyptians. Activist and scholar Rasha Moumneh, a researcher with Human Rights Watch who works with feminist and LGBT groups in the Middle East, including Egypt, spoke with me on the show from Beirut on Tuesday about what the protests might mean for LGBT Egyptians, who’ve long been brutally repressed by the Mubarak regime.Here is the full interview.

Administration Prepares to Lift Ban on New Guantánamo Cases – NYTimes.com. The Obama administration is preparing to increase the use of military commissions to prosecute Guantánamo detainees, an acknowledgment that the prison in Cuba remains open for business after Congress imposed steep new impediments to closing the facility.

How Blue America Subsidizes Red America. A very neat Aaron Carroll chart shows that, on average, conservative states feature more "dependency" on federal programs than do liberal ones. You can slice this kind of data in a variety of ways, but you always end up with the same aggregate pattern. It happens to be the case that the richest parts of the United States (think the San Francisco Bay area or Connecticut) favor Democrats and also that conservative areas of the country are overrepresented in the Senate. Transfers, on average, flow away from high-income and underrepresented areas and toward low-income…