The first post on this here blog popped up sixteen years ago, today. The original format of this blog was as a two-column “point-counterpoint” between moi, then “the left-leaning dog,” and the former blogger known then as “the rabid dog” and later known as “the raving atheist,” that lasted a couple of months or so, before the current one-column forum whereby “the talking dog” became the sole voice here. And so here we are. “Blogs” were then a new phenomenon, as the much younger internet (although then, as now, a little too dependent on gambling, porn and fraud) had not...

Run, don’t walk, to this piece in the Atlantic by Ta-Nehisi Coates called “The First White President.” For those wondering why so many were obsessed with “the White working class,” and what that had to do with an election where the circus clown (Coates prefers “carnival barker”) Donald J. Trump prevailed in every economic category of White people for no reason other than that he was White (to be fair, I would add that he was also male)… Coates gives us the rather unsettling answers. Coates’s thesis, which has the troubling attribute of evidence, is that the handing of the...

Next month will mark the sixteenth anniversary of this blog, not to mention the sixteenth anniversary of America’s Own Reichstag Fire[TM], September 11th (and now, as then, I still work a city block or so from the WTC complex). Still trying to reconcile the fact that the winning combination of the minority of American voters managed to install an actual circus clown as President, at a moment when the American Empire is coming apart at the seams anyway, largely as a result of the decisions made as a result of… the aftermath of September 11th. Specifically, the endless expenditure on...

Long-time GTMO prisoner and “child soldier” (apprehended and taken to GTMO when he was fifteen years old) Omar Khadr will receive ten million dollars in compensation for mistreatment he received in custody as well as an apology from… wait for it… Justin Trudeau’s Canadian government. You didn’t think that Donald Trump’s #AmericaFirstmeansRussiafirst government would have done anything like that, did you? Well, I didn’t. And it didn’t. Happy fourth of July. Given how much “great work he is doing” according to our current American President, I link you to Frederick Douglass’s Fourth of July address (Rochester, NY, 1852).

It’s Dominion Day in the Great White North (funny that expression in light of developments in the soon-to-be-former-superpower to its South)… and there were well-attended celebrations of Canada Day on its 150th anniversary. No context; just puttin’ it out there. Oh… isn’t he dreamy?

As is often the case, I must temper my remarks by noting my personal exhaustion: I had a “short finish” (31 miles out of the official length of 40) in yesterday’s BUS Anniversary Run in Queens (Alley Pond Park), followed by today’s NYRR Retro 5-Miler in Central Park to mark the NY Road Runners Club’s 59th anniversary. Seems a big weekend for running club anniversaries. And speaking of things that have been around a while, what can we say about the President’s ongoing feud with London Mayor Sadiq Khan, which resulted in the President pouring salt on the wounds of...

Everything I want to say on the subject has been said better by Professor Lemieux concerning what’s wrong with the chattering classes, to wit, God forbid political coverage tell us the actual substance of a policy, such as the abomination that just passed the House of Representatives that purports to repeal the suddenly-popular-package-of-health-insurance-programs-best-known-as-ACA-or-Obamacare. Bottom line to Chris Cillizza (formerly of WaPo, now trading his superficial wares at CNN) is that the Democrats sang the lines from a song by “Steam,” “Na na na na hey hey goodbye” (or whatever they did) upon passage of the bill in the House [btw,...

Could this Politico piece linking the Hasidic Jewish group Chabad, Putin’s Russia and Trump amount to a “unified field theory of #Trumprussia”? Certainly, many of the names are there; I believe that, perhaps, a Rosetta “Bayrock” might be a better explanation, as that name has come up before. Obviously, my good friend Donald J. Putin follows the issue more closely than I. Now that it seems, at a superficial level (an extraordinarily superficial level, because it is bullshit), an argument can be made that the gratuitous firing of 59 (why that number?) Tomahawk missiles at a Syrian airbase somehow takes...

Thus sayeth T.S. Eliot somewhere or other. As you know, it’s the 1st of April, a day for “fooling.” And indeed, in the history of this blog, I have often used the occasion for fun, such as my most-viewed-post-of-all time, this interview with former SecDef Donald Rumsfeld. Using my patented blog-interview format, I also presented interviews with notables such as Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin, and just last year, Donald J. Trump. Thing is, we are now in a world where everything goes and nothing matters, the world’s most prolific liars accuse others of spreading “fake news,” the most obvious lies...

I more or less agree with this quite critical assessment in Slate of last night’s “major scoop” concerning a release of President Donald Trump’s 2005 income tax return by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. I only tuned in as a result of a friend’s text message, and we both watched in rapt anticipation, which turned to disbelief when the first commercial break rolled around without “the big reveal.” At that moment, we both knew not only that there was no there there, but that “the story” was that (IMHO) it was more likely than not that the President himself leaked his own...