tdog

Evidently, census data is going to show that the nation’s “poverty rate” (an arbitrary definition to be sure, but unlike unemployment, at least a consistently measured one) will slide to a nearly 50 year high for 2009. While the A.P. piece observes it may be useful political fodder, I tend to agree with the observation made that “middle class unemployment” (somewhat of on oxymoron, but we know what they mean) will prove to be the more potent electoral issue. Of course, one must step back and note the whole subtext: the untold suffering of untold millions that, while fully felt...

Notwithstanding my unequivocal support of “The Mosque,” (I see Colin Powell agrees too) I’ve restrained myself from commenting on the sudden media notoriety of one “Rev.” Terry Jones of Florida, who has been promising to burn Holy Korans on the most Holy Day of the American Calendar (TM), you know… (hushed silence)… 9-11… largely because Jones is the type of small man who deserves no attention, a point brilliantly made here by Mike Thomas of the Orlando Sentinel, and duly ignored by the rest of our media. Of course, one obvious corollary point is that the broader media covers pathetic...

Surprise, surprise. Obama and Holder sold us out on the grand daddy of them all– the political decision to keep the promise it made at no cost… no fear of filibuster, no need to bribe Bart Stupek or Ben Nelson, no nothin’… just a willingness to honor Obama’s own God damned campaign promises. Too much to ask. Too much to ask. As the great Charlie Savage tells us in this piece in the Grey Lady, a sharply divided panel of the (almost) full 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, by a 6-5 vote, issued a decision upholding the...

The President uses the occasion of this Labor Day holiday to announce… $100 billion in proposed tax cuts for the rich…, specifically an extension of a business research and development tax credits that were part of the “stimulus” package (which itself consisted of an awful lot of tax cuts for the rich business.) Also on the table is another $50 billion in infrastructure spending. Thing is, I kind of like Nancy Pelosi; I hate to see her thrown under the bus. But when the bogus way that unemployment was counted by the Clinton Administration in order to make itself look...

The President used the conclusion of slow news month August for the purpose of announcing that major combat operations are complete the combat mission is over, and the 50,000 heavily armed American troops (to be complemented by a cohort of highly paid Blackwater mercenaries and civilian government and contractor personnel) who will remain in Iraq will be in a “non-combat” role. I am told that the total remaining American contingent of around 126,000 personnel to do whatever is they are supposed to do with respect to Iraq’s 25 million people… is around the same size as the British contingent of...

I defer to a piece from Who is IOZ? (in reaction to another in a continuing series of vapid “generational observation pieces” in various media, this one from Slate) to explain the situation in which young people entering (or relatively new to) the current American work force are up against: What they conspicuously fail to do is to cast their eyes toward yonder economy, except to make a vaguely Friedmanian observation that iPads mean you have to go to college or else you will never get hired. Hey, maybe decades of downward pressure on real wages, the destruction of even...

The President has every reason to be pleased with how the military is handling kangaroo courts show trials military commissions under his watch, as exemplified by the “interesting” holdings of military judge Army Colonel Patrick Parrish, who concluded that torture isn’t torture when the American military does it, and fifteen is old enough when it’s Omar Khadr “who was old enough” for whatever torture humane treatment the American military feels like inflicting on its juvenile captives. The heretofore classified opinion has been released during an interregnum in the Khadr trial, the first commission trial in the Obama era… because Khadr’s...

I’m with Greenwald on his take, both in his take that the President deserved effusive praise for his apparent willingness to buck public sentiment in support of an actual (rather than corporate) “American value” in the President’s apparent backing of the now infamous vicinity of the World Trade Center mosque and Islamic cultural center, and then the prompt withdrawal of that effusive praise when the inevitable political sh*t-storm followed, and the President did what I would have expected him to do, and “qualified” his remarks, as Greenwald notes, replacing an act of political courage with a non-sequitur about “the right”...

My country is trying Omar Khadr, a man who was 15 at the time of an alleged war crime, to wit, killing a soldier in combat, although, of course, at the time, Khadr was almost certainly unconscious and full of American shrapnel, which interrogators refused to treat him for while he was interrogated, and later, he was threatened with rape if he didn’t confess, and this is… President Obama’s first military commission trial. A shining example of American, ahem… justice. Trying a juvenile for what isn’t even a crime, and using his tortured confession as “the evidence.” We can’t even...