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Nelson Mandela passed away at 95. The post-title could relate to a mediocre semi-bio-pic (of Mandela) with Matt Damon and Morgan Freeman of a couple of years ago… but I’d prefer relating it to this poem, by William Ernest Henley [a poem supposedly recited by Mandela himself during his long incarceration at South Africa’s notorious Robben Island political prison]: : Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the...

It’s Mrs. TD’s birthday… so happy birthday to Mrs. TD! The White House is “optimistic” the President can bounce back from the biggest opportunity for genuine positive transformation in American history flushed down the toilet in order to give us Mitt Romney/Newt Gingrich’s Frankenstein monster of propping up health insurers by giving them public money “health care reform” and difficulties over the troubled roll-out thereof. Did we mention Michele O’s college classmate Toni, an executive at the company involved in said roll-out? [The evidence is somewhat dubious here, actually… and as a college classmate of Mr. Obama myself, I can...

Happy Guy Fawkes night. This year, it’s also an election, where my fair city will finally be replacing Mayor Millionaire Mike Billionaire Mike Bloomberg with Hillary Clinton’s former campaign manager. Still recovering from Sunday’s chilly NYC Marathon.., my 12th NYC finish and 37th marathon overall… perhaps 5 or 6 minutes faster than “the usual time” (and about that behind Pamela Anderson). My political realization of the day: Barack Obama owes a great deal to Bob the Builder. .

Well, the President decided he was coming right here to Brooklyn, landing in (and tying up) our beloved Prospect Park, and giving a speech on his education shtick at a Brooklyn high school. No comment, really… the problem with education in this country is the federal government… Can a call for school uniforms be far behind? Alrightie then. An earthquake and tsunami hit near Fukushima, Japan… yes, that Fukushima… Because the fact that the nuclear plant is in deep trouble and could, you know, result in some “bad” outcomes (up to… oh… wiping out life in the Northern hemisphere)… but,...

So the suspense is over… it’s monetary bid’ness as usual, as the President nominates Federal Reserve Vice-Chair[wo]man, [Brooklyn-born-and-bred] Janet Yellen to be the next most important person on Earth Federal Reserve Chair[wo]man. If you think Bernanke had a tough time improvising some way through the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent prolonged depression “Great Recession,” Ms. Yellen will promptly have to deal with even bigger “too big to fail” banks, even more debt and derivatives everywhere, the ongoing playground urinating contest government shut down and the granddaddy of them all… the ultimate own-goal… the potential American default, now slated for around...

Dear Lord, it’s been a dozen years, to the day, since the first post on this blog. Where does the time go?

John Cole gets right to it on “the national debate” after the D.C. Navy Yard shooting which left a dozen victims (plus the apparent perp) dead. The national consciousness will, of course, “move on,” like it always does. But this sort of thing seems to be happening more and more frequently. And yes… it is because we are becoming a more crass and violent society at every level (starting with the rotting fish head at the top as he proposes another pointless war against someone somewhere, because his overlords in finance demand it), as we promote violence in every last...

. Because September 11th only comes once a year. It’s only been a dozen years… indeed, I’ve been blogging for all of them… and yet, it all seems… so long ago when I got put out of my office a block from the WTC by the morning’s events, which seem ever more a distant memory (though I was there), and yet, the perpetual underpinning of what America has become. Ah… just a dozen years ago… back when things like the Bill of Rights seemed so… relevant. When it wasn’t my college classmate (twelve years ago, a political non-entity in the...

That’s the sentence handed down by a military court-martial to Bradley Manning for leaking evidence of the United States’s war crimes and other acts of malfeasance. The idea is to deter others who might have the audacity to try to let the public know what their government is up to. Hell– the government was arguing for an even longer sentence– of sixty years or more, to assure that Manning would die in prison for having the audacity to tell the American people what their government and military are doing in their name with their tax money. Damn him. Of course,...

Well, this piece from WaPo sort of lays out the conventional wisdom (as WaPo is wont to do)… to wit, given that the majority of the poor bastards still held at GTMO hail from Yemen, and given that there is a purported “threat” coming from “Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,” allegedly based in Yemen, this will “complicate” the return of said Yemeni men to their home country, which of course, had been held up by Barack Obama for years now, in response to “the underpants bomber,” but was supposedly “resumed” in response to the GTMO hunger strike. Of course,...