tdog

Damned if I know. That’s kind of the point, is it not? I got an e-mail from Randy earlier in the week, to tell me some dreadful news about someone we both knew from our work lives. As coincidence would have it, Norman was someone I had met in the job I managed to secure in White Plains, New York shortly after September 11th (I lost my previous job because of the proximity of that office to the WTC site, i.e. one block North of what is now the north side of “Ground Zero”). Norman was often kind enough to...

“If I can’t have it, NO ONE CAN!” Thus is the classic tantrum of many a small child, or, at present, twenty small, rich, spoiled children, who wrote a letter to Nancy Pelosi essentially threatening not to contribute to Democratic causes any longer unless Speaker Pelosi takes back her statements critical of Hillary Clinton’s attempts to save the party by stealing the nomination back from those stupid voters. I suspect that when this tactic starts to spin out of control (or be spun out of control, as the case may be), as with many a prior gaffe, Team Clinton will...

While I think of someone to post a picture of, check out Daddy’s Amercan Street entry of the week, If God Wanted Us to Keep these things, He wouldn’t have put them in the way. Daddy tells me I haven’t yet done… Ashley Tisdale. ! That’s right, Ashley Tisdale. (Click on her to see what she thinks about the dog she’s holding… and someone else.) I’m pretty sure that, like Selena Gomez, Ashley’s cool exterior hides a seething cauldron of petty jealousy and supreme rage. At least, I hope so. This has been… Vox Parvi Popui.

The first and still most logical reaction to the announced kerfuffle that each of the three remaining candidates (Clinton, McCain and Obama, in alphabetical order) had their passport files “breached” by State Department contract employees is “wtf”?. The first announced “breach” was of Obama, and his file was accessed three times (at key moments in the primary cycle) while McCain’s and Clinton’s were accessed once each, at different times, though in McCain’s case, by one of the same accessors. The first hope one has is the notion that maybe the powerful needed to be reminded once in a while that...

And so we come to the fifth anniversary of George and Dick and Don’s Excellent Iraq Adventure; MSNBC has a bit of a retrospective here. Fifth year traditionally marks the “wood” anniversary (I guess one would give gifts of… furniture or salad bowls?) And in the case of the Bush Administration, wooden sums up the thought processes surrounding the war. With the benefit of a little time, we can now see that there was no basis for anyone to have trusted this Administration in its claims of the allegedly grave threat presented by Saddam, and his now established to be...

This week, I’m going for a teeny-bopper celeb Daddy doesn’t even know about, Selena Gomez from “Wizards of Waverly Place” (click on her picture, and you’ll see how she really feels about one of those other teeny-bopper superstars). Selena is very popular with lots of kids I know. Honestly, she’s very pretty. On the outside. But inside, I’ll bet she’s a raging cauldron of jealousy and anger. And she’ll probably grow up to be a Republican (that’s Daddy saying that.) Speaking of Daddy, he makes me, as always, tell you about his American Street post of the week, called Secrecy...

While the media continues its ongoing obsession with sex, money and politics, Candace reminds us that her client Al-Ghizzawi is still dying at the hands of our government. We are holding this man that the military itself has found to be no threat to this country out of sheer spite, and we are continuing to deny him basic medical care while he is quite literally dying as “our guest” at Guantanamo out of even crueler arrogance… all because too many of us think that arbitrarily holding and torturing other human beings “makes us safer”. As I suggested to Andy, whom...

In keeping with Daddy’s sensibilities, for this week, I’m going to talk about something “literary,” and give you a picture of one of the morons (sorry, that’s what they’re called) from one of the leading literary works of our time, Jeff Kinney’s “Diary of a Wimpy Kid”. That’s Greg, the “wimpy kid,” behind the moron, who seems to reading something called “Terp”. Whatever it is, I’m sure it’s more grown-up than “My Pet Goat,” but then, we can’t all be as mature as I am. Daddy, as he makes me do every do week, says to check out “What’s Good...

Glenn Greenwald is on, of late. And hence, he puts the Samantha Power kerfuffle in its appropriate perspective, as outlined here in this thoughtful discussion of the remarks of Tucker Carlson on the current practice of symbiotic “journalism”. Like me, Glenn is concerned both with our nation’s inner police state (and how it is relentlessly continuing to assert itself), and with the principal means of getting that police state into place, i.e., the failure of our “fourth estate,” the only profession outside of government recognized in our Constitution. The press has been, to put it politely, falling down on the...

I have been forgetting one of the cardinal rules of American politics, set forth in the post-title above. Might Barack Obama somehow pull off the Democratic nomination, just because more people vote for him in primaries and he has more delegates? Sure… it’s possible. But he is running against Hillary Clinton, current matriarch of what Bruce the Veep politely calls the “Hillbilly MacBeths”. They play to win. Indeed, that is their appeal– really their only appeal. Now that they have finally had a successful play of the race card in TX and OH (and they hope it will also work...