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Thanks to whomever posted this gem from the Simpsons “Treehouse of Horror VII.” Be it Kang or Kotos, Goldman or Sachs… my vote is “no thanks.” Vote any way you want. You know where I stand.

All is well here in Stately Dog Manor in Brooklyn… alas, Familia TD in the NYC suburbs, especially up in Rockland County, continue to be without power. On a broader note, the Grey Lady gives us this round-up of frustrations associated with the (inevitably) slow recovery in many places from last weekend’s Hurricane Sandy. One of the frustrations that had been a growing irritant was the running of the NYC Marathon (given that there remain hundreds of thousands without power not to mention a seeming inability to get here– and frustrations involving the intersection of marathoners with hotel reservations and...

Discuss amongst yourselves. Or not. As you see fit.

As y’all know by now, the machines bureaucrats over at the Norwegian Nobel committee awarded this year’s Peace Prize to the machines bureaucrats of the European Union. Obviously, that committee has been phoning it in for years, with awards to such famous peaceniks as Henry “I Secretly Bombed Cambodia and All I Got was this lousy Peace Prize” Kissinger and, of course, my college classmate, Barack “Drone King… but I’m still not Dubya… really, I’m not…” Obama. At some point a while back, Candace asked me if it were possible for for the Nobel Committee to take back its Peace...

Ahead of tonight’s Presidential debate in Colorado, the Grey Lady gives a little background on the “even footing” Presidential debates will give The Two Candidates[TM]. Assuming I watch at all (the Yankees will be playing the Red Sox for God’s sake), it will be for the same reason most Americans watch Presidential debates… which is the same reason Americans watch NASCAR races. That, of course, is to watch over-hyped extremely loud machines go around in circles for hours, hoping that at least one of them crashes and burns. . Just saying.

It seems (as if this is a surprise, to anyone) that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, now holed up in the cozy Ecuadorean embassy in London, was designated “an enemy of the state” by American military officials (according to classified documents heretofore leaked to… Wikileaks.) This, of course, means that, without charge [Assange has never been charged by the United States with anything, though he has expressed fear that if he were extradited to Sweden on suspicion of sexual assault, he would be handed over the United States for “disappearing” (as an Australian national Assange might be eligible for Guantanamo Bay...

We start with the question posed by Peter Kirsanow in National Review Online, noting, among other things, unemployment figures, economic trends and polling on such questions as “is the country on the right track?” and “are you better off now than four years ago?” etc… and asks… “Why isn’t Romney ahead by ten points?” Possibly because Romney doesn’t know why you can’t roll down windows on an airplane. [That, and he wants to get those gosh darned snakes off his dang nabbed plane. Man, I could use a milkshake right about now.] Or maybe because in Romney’s world, he believes...

For the third consecutive try, I failed to reach the 26.22 mile marathon standard in a 6-hour race at yesterday’s Staten Island Six Hour (somewhat ironic, as I usually, albeit not always, complete marathons in well under six hours). Anyway, in my first try at a six hour race in 2010, I intentionally ended my day slightly early, knowing that my fall season would consist of two other marathons and a 50-miler that year. No such excuse this year, but my winter medical maladies have evidently resulted in some weight gain which I haven’t been able to shake; I went...

I began blogging at this domain on 18 September 2001… eleven years ago today. More on that below. First, it seems a federal Appeals Court judge here got the memo on the NDAA, and noted that when Congress and the President say we’re a de jure dictatorship, by Jove, we’re a de jure dictatorship, and if the Government feels like it, it can lock you up without recourse to, you know, law. This, of course, has been the law of the land for over eight years, ever since the Supreme Court refused to spring Jose Padilla. And hence, perversely, the...

And so we come to “that day”– like “that day” eleven years ago here in The City [TM], a Tuesday, with weather almost as crystal clear. I don’t know what to say any more. Like that day, this morning, I will make my way to work, more or less 100 meters or so from the World Trade Center site. But unlike that day, my assumptions about the nature of the nation I live in are wholly different. Then, there were expectations of Constitutional limits to what our government could do to us. We had expectations of a more or less...