tdog

Item: The Oroville Dam in California, the nation’s highest, in apparently in imminent danger of collapse after damage to the dam’s main spillway following severe storms earlier this week. A metaphor for other things? Or a cautionary tale for a global-warming-denying-President? Item: Democratic Senator Al Franken tells all who’ll listen that his Republican colleagues in the Senate believe that Republican President Donald J. Trump is mentally unstable. Item: The Grey Lady reports on turmoil at the National Security Council, where the National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, may well have improperly signaled future American policy to a hostile power (that would...

Hey, boys and girls, we’re not even two weeks into the (gak) Trump Administration, and we are so spectacularly dealing with all our old international friends, and our new BFFs over in Russia. In neighborly news… Item: The President evidently berated and threatened the President of Mexico during a phone call, replete with the threat of U.S. troops to combat drug traffickers in cases where the Mexican military couldn’t or wouldn’t, to, as Trump described it, stop “bad hombres.” According to reports, he also demanded Mexico pay for his God damned wall. Item: The President berated the prime minister of...

A federal judge right here in Brooklyn (I was just at a rather spirited rally outside the courthouse) just issued a nationwide temporary emergency stay of the “controversial” immigration ban on nationals of seven Muslim majority countries issued by the President earlier in the week. Protests had broken out all over the country over an ill-advised and poorly drafted order intended to implement the Trump campaign promise made to White supremacists at his Nuremberg style rallies to ban all Muslim immigrants. The order, which took effect without notice so that people literally in flight were effected, is deliberately intended to...

Brooklyn born Mary Tyler Moore passed away at 80. Mary played Laura Petrie (of New Rochelle, NY) for much of my early childhood, and then, from the magical era of my age 7-14 years, she was the uber-cool Mary Richards of Minneapolis, a 30-something single working girl (a t.v. news producer; the back story is that she broke up with a man she supported through medical school). For a political blog (that pretty much no one reads) I certainly do spend what seems (to me anyway) an inordinate amount of time on celebrity deaths, I’ll admit that this is that...

We must remember that it was only the media that first gave us Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee in the first place(how often can you report “superdelegates” in the count as real delegates…apparently as often as it takes). And then, it locked in our current predicament when it gave us Donald Trump as the Republican nominee (letting him be on all the talk shows without even showing up while the other candidates had to pay for ads… and don’t forget his gratuitous Saturday Night Live appearance as guest host, a privilege no other candidate of either party was afforded.)...

Final GTMO census number under now former President Barack Obama… forty-one men were handed off to the tender mercies of [gak] President Donald Trump, as of his inauguration mid-day on January 20. Andy, nearing the end of his American post-reality reality tour here has more on the ten men recently released to Oman. And so we have a challenge…and an opportunity. As Andy and GTMO attorney Tom Wilner recently noted in an op-ed in NY’s Daily News, at this census level, it costs around $10 million per prisoner each year… an insane amount of money simply to continue a pointless...

Given that we have the twitter President, at this point, I can only direct you to the twitter site of my good friend, Donald J. Putin. With the new regime, we have to take it literally, but not seriously. Whatever that means.

And we’re off. In an interview with the German publication Bild and London’s Times, the president-elect suggested that the NATO alliance was “obsolete,” that only five members (there are twenty-eight total members) are “paying their fair share,” he praised the Brexit vote, called the EU a device for Germany’s benefit to impose its will on the rest of Europe, and he threatened to impose import duties on BMW if it locates a plant in Mexico, as it proposes. He also suggested he wants a deal with Russia, to reduce nuclear weapons and to eliminate sanctions. He chided German chancellor Angela...

It’s the 15th anniversary of the opening of the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba today; Andy is stateside, and, when not sojourning at Stately Dog Manor, is down in Washington, where I will be as well, protesting near the Supreme Court (festivities start 11:30 a.m., for those able to join…) Obviously, none of us really know what the next Administration will bring… but, in matters GTMO, drone, indefinite detention, war/peace, etc…. it’s not like we don’t have “issues” with the current Administration. Just sayin’.

The Associated Press (btw, thanks AP for handing the nomination to Hillary and hence, the presidency to Voldemort Trump), via ABC, tells us that the president-elect seems to be moving at glacial pace (or not at all) towards divesting his far-flung corporate empire into any kind of “blind trust” prior to the inauguration. Regular readers (whomever you are) know from a post just yesterday that Mr. Trump himself is deeply in bed with and/or in hock to Russian and Chinese entities. Aside from the possibility (or probability) that unwinding his own actual interests (as opposed to notional interests) might demonstrate...