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Happy birthday to my college classmate, President Barack Hussein Obama, who turns 48. (Wherever it was he was actually born! Hey birthers… three words for you: GET. OVER. IT.) Helen Thomas, who turns 89 , joined in the birthday revelries with the President. Enough of this: Mr. President, I never want to hear the word “bipartisan” or any variant thereof during the rest of your Presidency. You have enough votes in both houses of Congress to treat the Republicans as what they are: an irrelevance. (Indeed, given the tendency of GOP Senators from Latino heavy states to announce their opposition...

Blogging lighter than usual here at Casa TD; a number of reasons for this. That day job that pays for the kibble has stepped up its demands (those slave-drivers!), I have some great interviews in the works (just as soon as I finish typing them!) and a coupla weeks ago… Mrs. TD brought home a pair of kittens… and let’s face it… blogging… or kittens? Blogging… or playing with kittens? Blogging is usually not gonna win, people. In coming to the realization that part of kittens’ appeal is that they just live in the moment (and make those around them...

The question almost comes down to “why didn’t Bush go ahead and accept Cheney’s pleadings to deploy the military to make domestic arrests of the so-called “Lackawanna Six” terrorist suspects near Buffalo, NY in 2002? As usual, another crazy-ass idea was backed up with a memo written by the always obliging John Yoo (man, he must type like 3,000 words a minute) and Robert Delahunty… but evidently, in this case, for some reason, “cooler heads” prevailed and convinced Dubya not to do it. Thing is, of course, that this was ultimately a political decision that had nothing to do with...

It seems the Senate isn’t having the President’s arbitrary healthcare bill deadline of August 7th (Barack’s birthday is August 4th, for those keeping track, whether in Hawaii or Kenya or Mars…) Anyway… when your opening message is “We’re going to reduce your coverage, increase your costs, and mess with something 85% of you have and are generally satisfied with… and still manage not to insure millions of people”… it comes as no surprise that when a majority of people favor single-payer health care … and its not even part of the first offer… you’ll end up with a wholly unsatisfactory...

This WaPo op ed by former NASA Administrator Michael Griffin observes that while we went to the moon 40 years ago (today), we couldn’t do it again… largely, because we dismantled the implements of the lunar landing program. Griffin suggests its because of the loss of “the vision thing.” I think it’s much more serious than that. I think we’re now largely a nation of actual-underachieving-children, maniacally good at little else besides playing with our asininely complex toys and padding our resumes (17-year olds now generally must have published novels, perfect SATs and grade point averages, multiple varsity letters and...

Longtime CBS news anchor, “most trusted man in America” and former TD East 50’s neighbor Walter Cronkite passed away at 92. Cronkite himself was unabashedly liberal, but as a newscaster (and news selector), his concern wasn’t about “objectivity” (though his was rarely questioned… see above re “most trusted man in America”), so much as getting the story… and getting the story right. I don’t know what Cronkite actually thought of what passes for “journalism” these days, such as the talking-head partisan shouters, or the vapid babbling of conventional wisdom, or of course, the printing of “both sides” press releases to...

Somehow I’ve gotten onto the mailing list of the American Bar Association… perhaps they’ve figured out that I have a license to kill steal practice law, after all these years (22? 23? my freaking GOD!). Anyway… the ABA Journal sends this little snippet from the most overrated corporate executive in the history of the world, former GE CEO Jack Welch, who tells us… wait for it… chicks who take time off for their kids (I suppose this would include giving birth to them) put their careers in grave peril, by not bein’ around ALL THE TIME to do the boss-man’s...

Our friend Rob Farley tells us in this in this Foreign Policy piece, “How I stopped worrying and learned to love put up with Iran having the bomb.” Rob’s message: calm the f*** down. While Iran is led by people who say the darndest bat sh*t things (and who dress funny)… so was China in the late 50’s, and indeed, China was, in many ways, far more worrisome than Iran… and yet… has been deterrable. I have said similar things: Ahmadinedjad, though a crazy, Holocaust-denying firebrand a**hole… ain’t running Iran. He is part of a front-operation for a group of...

No, I’m not talking about right-wing punditry, but in a long overdue visit to our friends at Pravda, this brief piece on last week’s cyber-attacks on key governmental websites in South Korea and the United States [ attacks which seem to be ongoing… possibly attributable to forces in… North Korea… ] While the Pravda discussion is a tad superficial (translation issues may be in play), the point is well-taken: we are in an era when it will get ever easier to impose potentially catastrophic damage on others remotely, without even having to get one’s hands dirty with a “traditional” WMD…...

To CNN’s credit, after its early failures to adequately cover the fluid, massive protests in Iran following that nation’s recent election in which controversial President Mahmoud Ahmadinedjad was reelected in an extremely controversial, widely believed to be rigged and illegitimate vote count, it seems to have gotten the message. So, while it’s unfortunate that the story is the Iranian government cracking down on a protest rally with its usual brutality on the tenth anniversary of a massive student protest ten years ago (back when Iran had its reformist President Khatami), I’m glad to see CNN covering it. One might think...