sfarber

The Grey Lady gives us this discussion of the aftermath of the jury death sentence verdict of Ronell Wilson in a federal courtroom in Brooklyn (the first federal death sentence in New York City since the era of the Rosenbergs); Wilson had previously been convicted for the brutal execution style murder of two New York City undercover detectives, James Nemorin and Rodney Andrews, in Staten Island, a crime that shocked the City at the time. A death verdict in a case in New York City (not even Sheik Abdul Rahman, Ramzi Youssef and the perpetrators of the first World Trade...

The Democrats managed to pass a minimum wage increase in the Senate (from a pathetic $5.15 per hour where it has been for over 10 years to a still low $7.25 per hour); against the threat of a filibuster, Harry Reid and the gang allowed some extensions of “small business” tax breaks, offset by some millionaire executive tax increases… a lot better deal, all told, than the Republicans had gone in with. On the whole, really a small price to pay for dramatically improving the incomes (by nearly 40%!) of those workers at the bottom of the economic ladder who...

Oy. First, the President decamps around 100 yards or so from where I work, to tell a bunch of Wall Street millionaires about how well the economy is doing… further telling Wall Streeters and CEOs to… wait for it… watch those executive compensation packages! Meanwhile, one of the most vocal and eloquent of the President’s critics, best-selling writer Molly Ivins, lost her battle with cancer, and passed away at 62. She famously called the younger President Bush “Shrub”, and quipped that he “was born on third base, and thought he hit a triple.” It appears that the Justice Department will...

Such is the conclusion of this piece in the Grey Lady that examines the real effects of Europe’s craze for bio-fuels, in particular palm oil grown in Indonesia and Malaysia. The conclusion is that while there may be some modest reduction in greenhouse gases in Europe, these modest reductions come at the expense of humongous carbon releases (third largest in the world) in Indonesia and Malaysia as carbon-trapping peat bogs are drained, and burned, to make way for palm oil plantations! Remember… burning wood, or corn oil, or sugar cane, is arguably “renewable”, but if the problem is the overall...

Apparently, as we come up to around a year (I think it was February 11th or 12th) since Dick Cheney accidentally blasted fellow quail-killer Harry Whittington down at the Armstrong place in Nowhere, TX, and as Dick has to come to grips with his good friend I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby probably facing jail time as a result of the Vice President’s personal vindictiveness (and the fact that Karl is so gooooodddd….) the rest of Dick’s mind seems to be getting as reliable as his aim, at least in this lengthy diatribe by Dan Froomkin writing in the WaPo… hat tip...

And so, it seems, that one of the most dangerous pandemics out there is not some new and exotic strain of avian flu from East Asia, or even some virulent germ warfare smallpox launched by our suicidal enemies… but good old tuberculosis, particularly a medication-resistant variety of TB now ravaging South Africa, particularly among its already AIDS ridden population. TB, of course, is something that is already running around America’s vast system of prisons… even TB of the drug-resistant kind. The thing with disease of this kind is that, like climate change, social class and money cannot guarantee protection from...

The Canadian government has come clean (clean enough, anyway) to compensate its own citizen Maher Arar for its role in feeding information to the United States that resulted in his detention and deportation-for-torture from what was supposed to be an in-transit-stopover-at-Kennedy Airport to (current bete-noire) Syria: Canada has apologized to Arar and will pay him over $10 million (Canadian). Arar’s case was the subject of some questions and answers in my interview with Jonathan Hafetz, and also in my interview with Michael Ratner, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights which represents Mr. Arar in his civil action against the...

Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the 2004 Democratic Presidential nominee, chose a lengthy speech on the floor of the Senate as the situs of his announcement that in the face of political 800 lb. gorilla Hillary Clinton, Kerry will not seek the Democratic Presidential nomination for 2008. While what probably finished him off was his own botched joke in California, intending to mock the President but actually ending up mocking troops in mortal danger, Kerry did run an abysmal campaign against as bad a sitting President as we have had in our lifetimes. In short, although I have come to...

The President fulfilled his Constitutional obligation to address the Congress once a year, and gave us his long, boring, stupid State of the Union address this evening. While Bill Clinton used to give endless and tedious laundry lists of lame governmental programs, at least, as a Democrat, he believed doctrinally that the government should do good for the public… even in stupid things like school uniforms. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, by contrast, appear to believe that the purpose of government is to enrich themselves and their friends, and basically, otherwise is merely a big gimmick to hold power...

Now a “bi-partisan” resolution to tell the President “No Surge” is floating through the Senate, this time put forth by Virginia’s John Warner, backed by sorta-Republican Susan Collins of Maine and the GOP’s Norm Coleman of Minnesota and Democrat Ben Nelson of Nebraska. This is presumably not what the President wants to hear going into the State of the Union address tonight… but then, the President has made it very clear he doesn’t listen to Democrats, polls, the public, reason, our allies… or members of his own party who say things he doesn’t want to hear. Someone suggested that a...