Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the 2004 Democratic Presidential nominee, chose a lengthy speech on the floor of the Senate as the situs of his announcement that in the face of political 800 lb. gorilla Hillary Clinton, Kerry will not seek the Democratic Presidential nomination for 2008. While what probably finished him off was his own botched joke in California, intending to mock the President but actually ending up mocking troops in mortal danger, Kerry did run an abysmal campaign against as bad a sitting President as we have had in our lifetimes. In short, although I have come to...

The President fulfilled his Constitutional obligation to address the Congress once a year, and gave us his long, boring, stupid State of the Union address this evening. While Bill Clinton used to give endless and tedious laundry lists of lame governmental programs, at least, as a Democrat, he believed doctrinally that the government should do good for the public… even in stupid things like school uniforms. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, by contrast, appear to believe that the purpose of government is to enrich themselves and their friends, and basically, otherwise is merely a big gimmick to hold power...

Now a “bi-partisan” resolution to tell the President “No Surge” is floating through the Senate, this time put forth by Virginia’s John Warner, backed by sorta-Republican Susan Collins of Maine and the GOP’s Norm Coleman of Minnesota and Democrat Ben Nelson of Nebraska. This is presumably not what the President wants to hear going into the State of the Union address tonight… but then, the President has made it very clear he doesn’t listen to Democrats, polls, the public, reason, our allies… or members of his own party who say things he doesn’t want to hear. Someone suggested that a...

It’s official: my fair state’s Junior Senator (with whom I share a birthday… us and Leon Trotsky, btw) Hillary Clinton has announced that she is forming an exploratory committee to run for President of the United States. Obviously, she would be the first woman and first former First Lady to be elected to the Presidency, should she prevail. And right now, she immediately steps in as the prohibitive favorite to win her own party’s nomination, and given the likely train-wreck the current President Bush will leave where the Republican Party once stood, whomever the Democrat is will be in a...

The Pentagon has released its long awaited manual on implementing the Military Commissions Act, which will permit evidence against those detained in the war on terror obtained by hearsay (i.e. the confronting evidence comes from a witness not in court and available to be cross-examined), and more troubling still, evidence (i.e. confessions or finger-pointing) obtained under torture coercive circumstances. Does this comply with our treaty obligations to ostensibly try those captured in a military conflict in the same manner as we would try our own people? Um… no. Nor, of course, does permitting evidence obtained while a detainee was being...

The President (according to what he said on 60 Minutes) says it’s full steam ahead with The Surge TM, no matter what those stupid Democrats in Congress or the vast majority of the American people think. Here’s the thing: this happens to be one of the few areas where the commander in chief power means what he thinks he does (as opposed to permitting a martial law declaration, or acting as if he had). This is a straight troop deployment. This is not a draft: these are troops already mobilized, many of them are already deployed somewhere… many of them...

Such seems to be the prevailing attitude of the CIA and Pentagon with respect to their use of “voluntary” letter requests for sensitive financial and credit information from financial institutions; American military and intelligence services have evidently sought and obtained such records by the hundreds in a number of cases of suspected terrorism. Given a government that can’t be bothered complying with FISA or the Fourth (Sixth… Eighth… First… or any other of those stinking amendments)… The paradigm was the use of this method to spy on former Gitmo Army Moslem Chaplain Captain James Yee in the hope that his...

In this case, it will be the encouragement by the Brazilian government of uncontrolled logging in the all-important Amazon rain forest, in this case, the very heretofore unexplored center regions, through auctioning off logging rights. Unfortunately for everyone else (and every living thing on the planet) the Amazon just happens to be our most important land-based ecosystem, for one thing, in terms of generating oxygen, as well as regulating those greenhouse gases (especially CO2), as well as the home to innumerable species found nowhere else… and, you get the idea. What we have is that most dangerous of all animals,...

Charles D. “Cully” Stimson of the Pentagon’s Detainee Affairs office (he’s actually DOD Assistant Deputy Secretary for that function) has called for a boycott of lawyers who have the audacity to represent Guantanamo detainees by corporate America. (Hat tip to Julia.) Even A.G. Alberto Gonzales and the White House and the Pentagon itself had to rhetorically distance themselves from these remarks, pointing out that yada yada yada we believe in fair trials. Of course, they don’t mean it: this statement was the newest trial balloon in their effort to see how the latest form of neo-crypto-racism (going back to generalized...

And now… News from the Escalation It seems that the Pentagon has overruled the Army on its longstanding policy of not recalling National Guard units that had served in Iraq until they were stateside at least five years… Sorry, guys and gals of the National Guard and Reserves… We know you might prefer to stay here with your families, your homes and your regular jobs… but you’all know that the President’s ego and refusal to admit that he has created a hash (and his, or his Saudi clients’ insistence on squeezing out the last possible ounce of your blood in...