sfarber

On this President’s Day, let’s all take a moment to salute one of the most consistently performing Presidents in American history, that, of course, being the current one. Unfortunately, he has been consistently performing at the level of disaster, and this observation in the Grey Lady about the reemergence of some centralized control of its network by the al Qaeda leadership should give us all pause, if not complete and total apoplexy. (It would seem, btw, that as yet another article in The Times laments the new design of the Freedom Tower for the World Trade Center site as reflecting...

(Updated) In a follow up from my American Street piece House of Pain (discussing the House vote on a non-binding resolution condemning “The SurgeTM”), it seems that the Senate Republicans, in contrast to their own threats to end fillibusters for their own purposes… now that they are not in the majority… the GOP Senators used a fillibuster (with the expedient of nine GOP senators not even showing up to vote) to block a non-binding resolution in the Upper House. Go ahead and say what you like about Joe Lieberman: he appears to have bucked the rest of (what he purports...

Submitted for your approval: Global temperatures (overall, not necessarily in any particular one location, such as the Northeast United States, for example) for January, 2007, were (surprise, surprise) the highest global temperatures ever recorded. You have just read our interview with Adam Stein of TerraPass, covering the gamut of global warming related issues. You might want to look at this fabulous takedown of what now passes for global warming skepticism by Kevin of Lean Left. As seems to be some kind of trend here, I’ll leave with you a little Dylan while you ponder all that… Outside of the gates...

An Italian judge has gone ahead and indicted 31, including 26 American CIA and military officials, for their role in the kidnapping (for “extraordinary rendition” and torture) of Abu Omar in Milan. This, of course, was one of the subjects of my recent interview with Stephen Grey, author of Ghost Plane, addressing the whole CIA kidnapping program. Kidnapping, it seems, is against the law in Italy, even when part of an expedient American policy. Although many of the indicted have assumed names, in some cases, the indicted used aliases jumbling character names from Friends and Will and Grace, in others,...

In this case, that would be hours and hours ago, and hundreds of miles away… where the President’s people, sensing the momentum for their Persian-Incursion warmongering letting up a bit, staged a Presidential press conference, at which the President continued his irrational and unsupported bantering as to why he is now ramping up staging and logistics for an attack against Iran. Because it’s getting late and I’m tired (and not just from the highest rated show in television history, “Meet the Nielson Families Up Close” John Edwards re-plays Bill Clinton’s best Lonnie Guinier moments the Amanda and Melissa show)… I’ll...

Despite the fact that… it’s not true… the Bush Administration is hellbent on asserting (via anonymous officials no less!) that Iran is smuggling weaponry used to attack American (and Iraqi) forces in Iraq. It certainly seems implausible from the get-go, because “Iraqi forces” tend to be overwhelmingly Shia, indeed, that’s the problem– they patrol with Americans by day, and by night, they form death squads and attack Sunnis (and Americans who might be trying to protect them). Indeed, the Bush Administration’s claims are preposterous on their face. Professor Juan Cole offers this rather extensive debunking; note that once again, The...

Fellow Columbia ’83’er [yes, on THIS blog, it IS always about me] Illinois’ junior senator Barack Obama announced his candidacy for President from the state capitol in Springfield, the situs of Lincoln’s “house divided against itself” speech to a crowd of onlookers and supporters… and we’ll be damned if Obama’s message wasn’t largely of the same theme as many of Lincoln’s… we’d better come together, we’d better end a lot of the pettiness of our current political era… that sort of thing. While I doubt that Barack is going to reach back to his college class for campaign staff [no,...

Other than to say, perhaps, “You go, Girls!” to Pandagon‘s Amanda Marcotte and Shakespeare’s Sister‘s Melissa McEwan, I was going to try to avoid the whole issue of the John Edwards campaign hiring those two big-time lefty feminist bloggers as part of his campaign’s web operation. But alas, the non-controversy controversy (the always polite, civil and courteous Michelle Malkin says that Amanda is potty-mouthed… the unbiased and non-partisan Mr. William A. Donohue, the president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, says she is “anti-Catholic”… I hear she might even be some kind of feminist or something… and...

Alas, we see that aside from losing the talents and inbound links of some of the greatest bloggers ever to… blog (Berube and Billmon, in recent weeks alone), we see from our new friend, Jon Swift, that the Mighty Atrios has taken to de-linking some of us less-kewl kidz… In lieu of actually thinking, let me just re-post, taken from my comment at Jon’s site (and corrected for, you know, grammar and s**t): Bless you, Jon Swift, for pointing this out. I see that the great Duncan has seen fit to jettison m’self (which given my recent traffic trends amounts...

The military authorities have announced the first three contestants among the Gitmo “worst of the worst” for the first three military tribunals under the new “Congressionally approved” show trials military commissions… meaning these three must be “the worst of the worst of the worst”. Fortunately for our readers, we happen to be familiar with all three of them, having, coincidentally, interviewed attorneys for all three. The lucky first of the worst are… David Hicks from Australia (Joshua Dratel is one of his attorneys); Omar Khadr from Canada (Rick Wilson is one of his attorneys); and the famous Supreme Court case...