sfarber

Well, well. It seems we have an… embarassing situation. It seems that a key Al Qaeda player just kind of walked out of American custody at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. Omar al-Faruq, purportedly an organizer of Al Qaeda in Southeast Asia and confidant of OBL himself, was captured in Indonesia, and rendered to us. Interestingly, Mr. Faruq’s disappearance (apparently, he picked a lock and slipped past an Afghan guard) has become an issue at a military trial in Texas of Sergeant Alan Driver on charges of abusing prisoners in Afghanistan (you will note that its always a sergeant; it...

The Grey Lady gives us this discussion of Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, a case where soon-to-be-Justice Samuel Alito, Jr. dissented in part in a case challenging various Pennsylvania state laws designed to reduce access to abortion. The part at issue, which reads like an audition to be this President’s nominee at this time, would require married women to notify their husbands to obtain an abortion… not encourage it, or suggest it… but require it, even in the case of abusive or criminally abusive husbands. A 6-3 Supreme Court held the other way in a decision by Chief...

Familia TD came down and rooted in the nation’s capitol, as we “ran” our second consecutive Marine Corps Marathon (the 30th edition of same, and in honor of the occasion, attended by 30,000 entrants, its largest field by far) in a time of… 5 minutes faster than last year! During our visit, we were delighted to dine with Familia Offering. This week-after-Fitzmas promises… a new Supreme Court nominee (as early as tomorrow). Let’s just say that the choice will be telling. Will the President go for another loyalist, or will he feel obliged to cave to the religious right (whose...

CNN is reporting that I[rve] Lewis “Scooter” Libby will be indicted later today, Rove stays “under investigation” and that Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald will make some kind of public announcement at a press conference at 2:00 p.m. EDT today. Talking dog senior legal analyst Mrs. TD had suggested that one possible strategy for Rove might be (rather than the childish name-calling he has already engaged in) to bait the prosecutor by daring him to indict… pointing out that any indictment would be based on nothing after years of investigation, slapped together at the last possible moment, and flimsy evidence. Your...

Pissed off at the Neanderthals who run the Kansas State Education apparatus, two leading national scientific and educational organizations have refused to grant the State of Kansas permission to use their copyright with respect to certain materials associated with the teaching of biology, a move expected to slow down, but not stop, Kansas’ asinine decision to teach fairy tales right next to actual science as part of some revisionist “scientific heresy critical studies thing” to satisfy certain religio-fascist extremists. Obviously, the Kansas State Board of Education has not yet been touched by His Noodly Appendage. Well, some sign of progress...

Harriet “Church Lady” Miers, the latest in government-by-crony nominations out of the Bush Administration, withdrew her nomination for Supreme Court Justice this morning. The bitter irony is that it’s only a matter of time before Bush, et al. manages to blame obstructionist Democrats, who, of course (alas) had nothing to do with the attacks on Miers’ nomination. Those concerned her lack of fire-breathing hard-ass right wing credentials (see “Bork, Robert”, rumored to be a possible replacement candidate himself… would that be sweet, in its own perverse way?), her lack of constitutional (or other relevant) experience, her close ties to the...

Well, in 1979, I was… 26 years younger than I am on this, the birthday that I share with fellow luminaries Jaclyn Smith (Charlie’s Angels of Anaheim), Hillary Clinton (Chicago Cubs of Chappaqua) and on one of the two calendars in use at the time, Leon Trotsky (Reds of Moscow). It appears that my birthday won’t have Fitzmas fall on it this year, I’m afraid. Well, tomorrow’s another day. 1979. 1979. Something happened somewhere that year… Oh yes. Now I remember. It seems that Iran’s new hard-ass hardline president is back to those rallying cries that got him elected in...

Amidst the horrors ravaging Florida (and previously Mexico and the Caribbean region) from Hurricane Wilma, for a time the strongest hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic, we learn the sad news that civil rights pioneer and icon Rosa Parks has passed away at the age of 92. It’s been over fifty years since Ms. Parks set off a lengthy bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama and a national protest over her refusal to yield her seat in the front of a city bus to a white passenger, helping to set in motion a chain of events that eventually broke up overt...

Well, not necessarily every talking dog will love the latest strategy coming from GOP Central: malign that picayune, hypertechnical prosecutor, belittle the nature of the crimes as hyper-technical inside-the-beltway stuff and continue to behave as if the population writ-large will let the usual bullshit machine spin treason as the most arcane of technicalities, as laid out by the somewhat complicit Grey Lady. Well, well. Let’s follow along with the Grey Lady’s own complicitity in serving the propaganda goals of the Administration in lying about WMD’s in the first place, we see the publicly played out little internal dance between managing...

Our overdue return visit to our comrades at Pravda leads us right to this take on Syrian criticisms of the United Nations’ report which places clear blame for the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri… that report, of course, prepared by a German examining magistrate, concludes that Syria was in it up to its eyeballs and those of Syrian President Bashir Assad’s brother in law. The Pravda piece also lets us know that Syria needed some help from Lebanese officials, up to and including, of course, the services responsible for guarding dignitaries like Mr. Hariri, who, evidently, had...