sfarber

Italy defeats France to win the soccer World Cup, 5-3 on post-overtime penalty kicks. And thus, Italy, which has some kind of soccer scandal going on back home, can put it aside for awhile with raucous celebration in a sport… about which we stateside care pretty much… nil. As in 1-nil, what announcers insist on calling a 1-0 game… of football… on the pitch… and other stupid terms favored by soccer snobs. Look: the Loquacious Pup plays the game (or a version designed for six year olds, anyway), coached by me… and we did well this year (thanks to our...

Not content to blame “asymmetric warfare” for the detainee suicides at the American detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the Pentagon has now figured out that the detainees who killed themselves last month probably passed notes using papers marked “attorney-client privilege” ordinarily used to communicate with their lawyers. As a result of this, naturally, the Pentagon has said that the practice of permitting such communications between detainees and their attorneys in writing will now be suspended. The government is seeking a court order to permit at least some form of interception of these attorney-client notes. As the WaPo piece notes,...

On this first anniversary of the terrorist strikes in London, we here in New York can go back to panic, even as an apparent attack on our PATH commuter rail tunnels (leading in to the WTC) was thwarted. The plan involved an attempt to flood lower Manhattan. The good news: the plot was thwarted. The bad news: the plot was thwarted by law enforcement, and apparently, federal, state and local law enforcement acting within the scope of the Constitution, rather than by “robust” military action and foreign policy and national security apparatuses using extraordinary powers. Well, there’s always next time…

Oh my God! They killed Kenny! YOU BASTARDS! Kenneth “Kenny Boy” Lay died today at 64, in Aspen, Colorado, of an apparent massive coronary. Lay, the founder of former energy giant Enron, was, of course, sentenced for fraud and related crimes surrounding the massive collapse of Enron, and would have likely been sentenced to at least 25 years in prison, or an effective life sentence in any event. Lay, of course, will not serve that sentence. Query whether the thousands upon thousands of people who watched their jobs disappear, pensions or stock portfolios evaporate, or who were, for example, grossly...

Not much blogging by me anticipated during this putative four day weekend, so… go do something else!!! Or check out the good stuff going on with the blogs on the sidebar. Or whatever. You might want to consider the interviews with those knowledgable with issues associated with the law associated with the “war on terror”, and particularly, of course, my most recent with Jeff Addicott immediately below. Consider the most fundamental question of all, which overrides all others, as so ably expressed by Professor Addicott: are we, in fact, at war? Indeed, can we be at something called “a war”...

I’m unable to come up with a catchy post-title for the Supreme Court’s long-awaited decision in the case of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. I’ll just let the decision speak for itself. Ostensibly, the Supreme Court (by a not unexpected 5-3 majority of Stevens, Souter, Breier, Ginsberg and Kennedy, over a dissent of Scalia, Thomas and Alito with Chief Justice Roberts abstaining because of his participation in the lower court’s decision) held that the military commissions proposed by the President to try ten Guantanamo detainees (and possibly a number of others) is unlawful, insofar as such commissions are unauthorized by any statute...

We’ll start stateside, where Republicans in Congress, who can’t seem to get it together for an immigration bill or much of anything (not even elimination of the Paris Hilton tax!) , can at least agree that the one thing they all despise is a free press, took time away from trying to pollute the constitution with bans on flag desecration and gay marriage, and the House Speaker announced introduction of a resolution to condemn the New York Times for, you know, reporting the news. As I’ve said before, if there’s one thing this country just can’t abide, it is knowing...

The Unseen Editor forwards this from the Buckeye State Blog, documenting troubling aspects of the Sherrod Brown-Paul Hackett “netroots” Ohio senate fiasco, but from the standpoint of criticizing blogging 800 lb. guerrillas Markos “Daily Kos” Moulitsas and Jerome “founder of MyDD and friend of Kos” Armstrong, and in particular, their sorry role in that sorry event (that culminated in Hackett being kicked out of the race and withdrawing from politics, and perhaps, with Mike DeWine holding an otherwise takeable seat.) Blogging, of course, is proof positive that no matter what the human endeavor, human beings have a herd instinct. Daily...

And so Israel prepares to invade the Gaza Strip (again)… this time to rescue a kidnapped soldier (Corporal Gilad Shalit) that Palestinian idiots militants kidnapped after tunnelling under the border with Israel and attacking a border post, kililing two other Israeli soldiers in the process. The kidnapped soldier’s fate is a big deal to Israel, which will put up with almost anything directed against its civilians, but goes absolutely mad when anyone attacks its soldiers. (Such is the nature of truly universal conscription, at least in Israel. There is also another missing Israeli, believed to be in the hands of...

We are losing troops and spending billions of dollars in Iraq, each and every week. The Taliban may be regrouping in Afghanistan. OBL and the AQ leadership remains at large. The federal budget deficit, and our trade gap, are at record levels with little relief in sight. Scientists are making troubling new findings about global warming. Tens of millions of Americans feel their jobs are threatened by illegal immigration, and there has been no minimum wage increase for over a decade. With all this going on, of course, it’s obvious what the most important issue of the day is, warranting...