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Check out this week’s AmStreet entry, Unpersons (Not Even 3/5)! I think the expression is “disappointed but not surprised” by the D.C. Circuit’s decision to toss out a suit brought by former GTMO detainees seeking damages from their torture mistreatment at American hands.

Well, well. Today, exactly six years and four months since 9-11, marks exactly six years since the first guests arrived at America’s tropical beach resort gulag at our naval air station, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, more accurately, the flagship gulag of an international gulag archipelago. The ACLU has evidently designated today as “Close GTMO Day”. Nice sentiment; necessary but not sufficient, of course. It’s not even about releasing the remaining 280, 290 poor bastards we’re holding there, or even the other 10,000 or so we’re holding in Afghanistan, Iraq, Diego Garcia, Thailand, Romania, elsewhere in Europe, the Middle East and God...

Yes! What a night for AARP! Two of its members, seventy-one year old John McCain, who as late as a few weeks ago, was written off as (politically) dead, and sixty year old Hillary Clinton, who just yesterday was believed to be crushed to death under Omnibus Obama… have both emerged to win their respective parties’ primary in New Hampshire. On the Democratic side of the roster, Hillary edges out Obama around 39% to 37%, though CNN projects each will get 8 delegates, with Edwards out of the money at around 17%, and frankly, out of a particular reason to...

We reward our politicians for being not-very-bright twits who can stay “on message,” at least, if 2000 and 2004 have taught us anything. Enter Hillary Clinton, trying to smash through the glass ceiling in the likeliest way it will be done here (in an America that’s way more conservative than any would care to admit): dynastically. As a woman, of course, she must contend with having to be a fragile little thing who is tough enough to have her finger on the button. Ah, but as Hillary Clinton, she is supposedly already a ball-busting automaton… So, of course, when the...

First, check out this week’s AmStreet entry, “Never the Crime, Always the Cover-Up” in which I give a hearty welcome to the Street’s newest co-blogger (and TTD’s newest commenter!), BossKitty. The point there is that, as with the case of Abu Ghraib, and even Plamegate, it’s not the people actually responsible (i.e., Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, et al.) who pay the price for official misdeeds, but people down the line… usually way down the line. It is my hypothesis that the American people at least as expressed by their 1/100 scale model in Iowa, are sick and tired of it....

While I won’t dignify the individual posts of Mr. Scaife’s loyal retainers Goldberg and Reynolds by actually linking to them, Glenn Greenwald does, in the interest of demonstrating that the preemptive race-baiting among Republican mouth-pieces has begun. Son of Lucianne gets things started for us by suggesting that “some people” will not take kindly if Obama is either out-played by Clinton for the Democratic nomination, or worse, screwed (Gore or Kerry style perhaps) in the general election… you know (wink, wink)… “race riots”. “He’s right, you know.” The Old Perfessor quickly adds, in a pile-on (extraordinary reminiscent of “Mr. Hilter’s”...

The results are in from the Iowa caucuses. On the Democratic side, it’s Obama (38%), Edwards (30%) and H. Clinton (29%), with Richardson and Biden in low single digits, and Dodd under 1% and withdrawing from the race. This was predicted as a close 3-way, and it was. It seems that, at least in lily-white Iowa, America’s First Black PresidentTM proved a liability for America’s First Woman PresidentTM, and may well help elect America’s actual first Black President (not to mention the first President from my college– and my college class no less)! Oprah, it seems, is every bit as...

It’s 2008, the Iowa caucuses are tomorrow, so it’s time for… another Rudy Giuliani scandal. In this case, for a change (and I do mean for a change) there appears to be no crime actually committed by Rudy himself… the Grey Lady gives us this lengthy article on the subject of St. Rudy’s intervention with a rural Virginia federal prosecutor concerning an investigation and ultimately guilty plea of a Connecticut based pharmaceutical company who misled doctors and consumers and regulators about the addictive effects of the pain medication oxycontin. It seems that many relatives of young people who died after...

Finally, the bad news about the United States of America not being in the top tier in stupid things like life expectancy, infant mortality, education of our children, and so forth, just has to give way, because we are among the world’s elite… in the category of surveillance states. (h/t/ U.O.) We join other notables like China, Russia, and the United Kingdom in this elite category. Yes, the U.K. has a big edge on us in surveillance cameras; we certainly have our work cut out for us to catch up on that one. Further, the U.K.’s “unwritten Constitution” gives that...

As I sit here listening to a repeat local broadcast of Naomi Wolf tell us about current parallels to Weimar Germany (hint: think “Blackwater in the streets”)… we’ll jump right in with the WaPo’s account of the detention of Saudi blogger Fouad al-Farhan. Fouad had, evidently, been warned that his blogging, which often was critical of government corruption and critical of other arbitrary detentions in Saudi Arabia, might get him in trouble. Apparently it has, as he has been arrested for violating mysterious “regulations not related to state security”. Our supposed key ally Saudi Arabia, now led by King Abdullah,...