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You don’t need me to tell you that life isn’t fair. But some things just… well… “Unfair” doesn’t do justice to… a magintude 7.0 earthquake hitting Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere… seems a bitter pill, indeed. You might try contributing to the Red Cross, or UNICEF, or Doctors Without Borders, or the reputable charity of your choice. Let’s do what we can. And, in further proof that life isn’t fair, 104 year old strongman Joe Rollino was struck and killed by a car here in Brooklyn. One of the most popular Coney Island strong men, he was...

This absurdly cold Saturday (it started around 20 F here in NYC, but with 25-35 mph winds swirling…felt colder), we treat you to two items that, if you think that having a Bill of Rights is “a good thing,” might just may make your blood run colder still. The first (h/t Candace) concerns a sudden “controversy” over what heretofore hadn’t been particularly “controversial,” that being, the seemingly routine release of two Guantanamo detainees who have been determined to have done nothing wrong (and hence, have been wrongly held for eight years), said release now being “controversial” for no reason other...

We are rapidly coming up to January 22, 2010, the day that President Barack Obama will have unquestionably broken a promise that, at the time he made it anyway, was 100% within his power to keep, that being to “close Guantanamo within one year.” The thing with the Guantanamo promise, aside from candidate Obama’s stand on the issue having been a selling point for many rubes and suckers (such as myself) to support his candidacy, is that it was an actual concrete promise on which we can clearly measure accountability, rather than the nebulous (and ultimately meaningless) “hope and change”...

It may be a new decade, but that’s no reason not to go to a good old throw-back here at TTD, and what better way to start a new decade than with a nostalgic revisit to “Saturdays with Pravda” to this piece telling us that… wait for it… over 60% of Russians are nostalgic for the Soviet Union. For many Russians, guaranteed housing and employment and cheap food (even if variety wasn’t tremendous) seem better than the rough and tumble of capitalism where (this is just crazy talk)… many people don’t live quite as well… but a few people are...

On this first day of the new year, and the new decade (and, as always, “the first day of the rest of your life” and all), I’ll just link to the Grey Lady’s annual salute to the revelers in Times Square. Others might note that thousands upon thousands upon thousands of New Yorkers and others ignored Dick Cheney’s consistent message of doom and gloom about “security threats” and went on with the celebration, but I’m just going to go with the “life-affirming” thing… people just want to come out and celebrate the passage of time, and express their hopes and...

I see that this time last year, I was much more upbeat than I am now. Maybe it was like finding a shiny new penny… so exciting, until you realize that it has no buying power. Or perhaps it was like embarking on that long-awaited vacation, before the unpleasant reality that “it may be fun while it lasts (or perhaps it won’t be), but in any event it’s not really going to change anything once you get back to the usual humdrum or pain or whatever it is that defines your life.” But it proved to be something like that....

Loyal reader Michael from Mass. sends along this piece of snarky brilliance from “Who is IOZ?” I can’t really top it; the brilliant synthesis of the micro- and macro- of what my country has become, makes me want to laugh and cry at the same time. To wit: While good progressive types bray that the traitorous Obama econ team is feverishly working to reinflate the bubble, as if Larry Summers et alia were unaware of their own project, from my cheap seats it seems the perfectly reasonable thing to do, if indeed your ultimate goal is the maintenance of a...

This Ashura, things is heating up in Iran again, with reports of violent clashes between street protestors and forces loyal to the “government” led by Mahmoud Ahmadinedjad and supreme leader Ayatollah Khamani; among the reported dead is the nephew of opposition presidential candidate (and opposition leader) Mir Hossain Mousavi. Assuming arguendo that our Presidential elections actually matter (and if the 2008 election hasn’t already disabused us of that ridiculous notion, I don’t know what will), one must still at least give the Iranians props for refusing to sit idly by when a presidential election is so clearly stolen right in...

I don’t agree with Congressman Dennis Kucinich on everything, but after a while, I find that I agree with him on more and more things, such as his sentiment that generals who publicly advocated certain military policies viz Afghanistan should be fired [as an aside, note the tenor of the comments, and one can, I suppose, get a flavor for who reads “The Hill,” or at least, who read that particular post.] Kucinich went much farther than I did, of course, in calling for a complete American pullout from Afghanistan (which, unlike a pullout from Iraq, which is essential), I...