tdog

It’s August, the proverbial home of slow news days and famous for being the month “you don’t launch new products in.” And so… item the first… the swearing in of the nation’s 112th Supreme Court justice, fourth woman, and I believe, youngest person, Elena Kagan I’ve stated my feelings on the subject.. The confirmation hearings have not changed my view… and as an added bonus, there is a strong possibility that Justice Kagan will have to recuse herself on any “national security” cases, effectively reversing Justice Stevens without having to go on record. No point in getting all “partisany;” my...

Unsurprisingly (given how strongly Mayor Bloomberg supports real estate development religious freedom, New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission approved plans for a large Islamic Center (and mosque) on the site of a former Burlington Coat Factory store in lower Manhattan, over two city blocks from the World Trade Center site, In his inimitable style, Brother Roy explains it all for you; Roy Edroso is so thorough, so on, there’s little I can add. So I will add… a little. . When I first heard this story pitched, I, like everyone else, assumed that plans were for a Mosque in Ground...

Yes. yes, a picture is worth… well, you know. So we’ll start with this Financial Times piece that’s pretty verbose in its own right, in which, through the examples of a family in Minnesota and a family in Virginia that are offered as paradigmatic of larger trends in the United States that, in the Cliffnotes version of the piece, amount to a middle class whose present existence is progressively more squeezed causing trepidation particularly viz concerns for retirement and their children’s futures, with a somewhat uniquely for Americans sense of foreboding for the future in general. And thus, we find...

I had been “ambivalent” in my feelings toward Arizona’s rather nasty sounding new law (“SB 1070”) which ostensibly tried to criminalize being Latino undocumented, considering both (1) that the federal government has utterly defaulted in the immigration area both by permitting the border to largely be out of control and to have a “wink wink” policy that purports to make it “illegal” to enter and work in the United States without legal authority to do so, with very real local consequences that has made a great number of people genuinely fearful and desirous of “doing something,” and (2) that Arizona...

A huge cache of classified military documents from soldiers in the field and other military personnel providing a never before seen view of the Afghan war has evidently been leaked on Wiki-leaks, and previews have been given to England’s Guardian, to the New York Times, and Germany’s Der Spiegel. Among the details released are the larger than expected (which by me was thought to be “pretty large”) extent that Pakistani intelligence services have been helping the Afghan insurgents, , , the White House condemned the release of any and all information that might tell the public what the Government is...

This week, the Grey Lady treats us to the obvious in both its news and vapid op-ed pages. The New York Times is certainly not alone in this department (and I don’t mean that by picking on it, I am suggesting it is unique in its inanity) but it is my hometown paper and all, and supposedly a bastion of liberalness and certainly a bastion of arrogance,,, and well,,, you know! We’ll start with a subject near and dear to my heart, at least my professional one I suppose, and talk about “the law.” We get this Adam Liptak piece...

I’m saddened to hear about the death of long-time (as in forever) broadcaster Daniel Schorr, but a little less so when I saw that he was 93. I figured him for not a day over 87. On the radio, at least, he seemed to still have all his marbles… maybe that was just an act, like his curmedgon thing… which I suspect, was no act. Anyway, I always enjoyed his recitation of conventional wisdom on National ‘Pologist Radio (NPR), not for the conventional wisdom itself, which is every bit as worthless coming from NPR’s airwaves as it is on any...

A special master charged with “tut tutting” but with little actual power to do anything about it has concluded that major Wall Street banks… wait for it… gave out “excessive bonuses” to their most beloved insiders during the 2008 financial crisis. The special master whose job seems to be to “tut tut” (as 11 of the 17 institutions that received what many thought then was unnecessary federal bailout money have easily paid it back… with the miniscule interest demanded, it seems there is little if any ability or authority to “claw back” the “excessive” bonuses which were paid by such...

Look: I love Glenn Greenwald. He has the temerity to get in The One’s [TM] face just about every day, unswayed from the star-struck-teenage-girl bullsh*t that defines most of my brethren and sistren “progressives” in bloggyland, who somehow think because my college classmate The President is on “our team,” that he is “a good guy” who “is on our side” and “means well” notwithstanding his advancement of his predecessor’s (and his predecessor’s, and so forth, back to God knows when) systematic and seemingly inexorable advancement of “the national security state”.. even though, in the case of Barack Obama, he campaigned,...

I was most saddened when Candace told me that Charles Gittings passed away at the extremely untimely age of 57. Charly (whom I interviewed here) epitomized the concept of “citizen activist.”. Charly’s Project to Enforce the Geneva Conventions was a kind of one-man-show. It served as both an archive of the misdeeds of those of in power and a back-drop for Charly’s one of a kind advocacy. Despite not having legal training, he submitted a number of amicus curae briefs in major “war on terror” cases that were so brilliant that they downright sung. I can only wish we saw...