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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.

We’ll start with the preposterous moral/legal state we now find ourselves in, whereby the prospect of having a criminal trial for actual criminals is now so controversial, the Secretary of State has to defend it.. I remember back ’round a quarter century ago, when I personally had to take an oath upon joining the very same Department of Justice that is now asked to be the courtroom face of outrageous American governmental policies (like liquidation of enemies of the state, state secrets, the end of habeas corpus, etc., etc.)… and that oath required me to oblige myself to defend THE...

A former Guantanamo detainee was… wait for it… tried in a civilian court in New York City and… wait for it… he was acquitted of all but one count; he was convicted of one count of conspiracy to destroy government property. Ahmed Ghailani had actually been indicted by a New York federal grand jury before 9-11, for his role in the 1998 bombings of United States embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in which hundreds were killed, including a dozen American nationals. Key rulings by federal U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan included the blocking of a key...

To Mrs. TD!!!

I’ll defer to Krugman for this explanation of the President’s various failures in the economics front which led inexorably to the mid-term election results, to wit, an electorate with no love for Republicans handing them control of the House of Representatives anyway, because the President sold them out on everything they hold dear economic recovery, both as a matter of style and as a matter of substance. And substance, especially. Professor Krugman nicely weaves in Obama’s bogus campaign themes that genuine hostility between the party of the richRepublicans and the other party of the rich, only less effective Democrats was...

Jim Henley gives us his take on the highjacking of Armistice Day by the forces of militarism and war-mongering, thereby investing the Newspeak holiday of “Veterans Day” with a creepy vibe that’s exactly the opposite of what was originally intended for the holiday. TD Sister sends us this Grey Lady piece on the legal, financial and other troubles encountered by a former coal baron trying to take on one of the most evil corporate empires in America (and as you know, that’s saying something). And in perhaps his greatest act of contempt yet for the City of which he is...