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Having blown his “close Guantanamo within a year” promise (and well before then, of course, sacking White House counsel Larry Greg Craig for having the audacity to make him publicly state the promise in the first place)… the Obama Administration proposes an “executive order for permanent detention”… which… is kind of exactly where we are now… isn’t it? Some four dozen men would still be too-dangerous-to-release-but-too-tortured-to-prosecute, trials would have to be by military commission… oh, but there would be some kind of meaningless “review process”… perhaps even every year! As with the terms “enemy combatant” and “war on terror”… the...

Attorney David Coombs, counsel to one [ex-?]-PFC Bradley Manning justs wants to give you “a day in the life” of Private Manning. I won’t go into much more detail (Mr. Coombs does that himself… read the link if you want it), but Private Manning is required to sit in his rather small cell (and sit it is… he will be stopped from any form of exercise) for 23 hours a day or so, then allowed for a figure-8 walk in a concrete room for up to an hour a day, with limited opportunity to read, watch television, write to approved...

The Grey Lady treats us to the comedy stylings of Tom “the billionaire” Friedman. The title is a reference to the former President of Costa Rica imploring the world (that would be, of course, the United States) to “do something” about climate change, because there is no “Plan B” for the planet; Friedman conflates this to note there is no “America B” (forgetting that, of course there is an America A and B: the America A of the uber-privileged people sitting on mega-millions, such as… Tom Friedman himself.,. and the America B of the rest of us, where even the...

Well, the L.A. Times gives us this editorial suggesting that “Guantanamo Must Go,” in the case of the editorial, specifically opposing adoption by the Senate of a poison pill slipped into a recent Defense Authorization Bill by the House of Representatives that would preclude funding of transfer of Guantanamo detainees to the United States even for war crimes trials… though, Congress’s fecklessness in this area is even ahead of that of the Obama Administration’s. Which takes us around 200 miles South of my usual haunt in Brooklyn (and my workplace in the shadow of Ground Zero), where, in a case...

For our first ever embedded video, we at TTD thought we would use the occasion to explain to you something fundamental about the nature of (our college classmate) President Barack Obama, as he, once again, in not only selling out the rest of us to keep the Bush millionaire tax cuts, but to de-fund social security too..(and even more troublingly, to be pissy about it). behaves bizarrely if one thinks we were going to get that “hopey changey” thing… but perfectly reasonably if one realizes that he is just a guy doing the job that hedge fund guys put him...

David Rees is just a freaking genius, as “The Return of Get Your War On” demonstrates (via the incomparable Bill Scher.) Warning: do not read while drinking anything.

I actually like the mechanics of this proposal from Professor Jack Balkin, which he terms a form of “constitutional hardball”. The proposal, in a nutshell, is to by-pass Congress altogether– let all of the Bush tax cuts expire (as they are scheduled to do absent Congressional action, in less than 27 days), and then unilaterally declare an executive “payroll tax holiday”– as a matter of national emergency– ordering the Treasury Secretary to refuse to collect the highly regressive federal payroll taxes, and then daring Congress (presumably the Republican House) to sue him. The problem with this is fairly obvious, and...

Among the massive load of State Department internal communications that were the subject of the most recent document release by Wikileaks (if Barack Obama refuses to honor his promise of “transparency in government, it seems that Julian Assange of Wikileaks is going to do it for him… by the way, if Julian Assange isn’t “the man of the year,” you got me as to who is)… is a comment by State Department officials that public enemy number one that terrorist former GTMO prisoner Moazzam Begg was doing the United States’ work for it in speaking throughout Europe in an effort...

I’ll vaguely defer to this from Steve concerning a supposedly thwarted car bomb plot involving a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland, Oregon… though, of course, unlike Steve, I have no particular “admiration” for an FBI that devoted so much of its efforts to setting up some jerky native-Somali kid into a “terrorism” plot that he might or might not have otherwise engaged in (probably not, being my implication) rather than, you know, hunting down actual terrorists (either of the top two guys at al Qaeda might be nice). But hey… that’s just me. (For more of my thoughts on...

Happy Thanksgiving to you and your families; Brother Dmitri tells us what, as Americans, we should actually be thankful for. Of course, that said, one does marvel at thie timing of this. Just saying.