It may seem a bit odd that the approaching Apocalypse would be greeted as good news… but this is so only if you’re a Republican, of course. In this case, that would be North Korea’s announcement that it intends to test detonate a nuclear bomb. While it is widely believed that North Korea has around 11 nuclear bombs, no one knows for sure that any of them work. Given the failure of its mid to long range Taepodong missile earlier in the year, it is always possible that its nuclear ambitions and capabilities are greatly overstated. A successful test of...

I frankly still find it hard to believe, but Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-HCA) has called for the Afghan government to invite the Taliban into the rulling coalition. You all remember the Taliban, I suppose. These are those extremely devout (in their peculiar parochial version of Islam anyway) Moslems who like to stone women for the hell of it, blow up world treasures like the giant stone Buddhas at Bamiyan, make women wear head to toe burqas and not go to school and make men wear beards… and, of course, they famously harbored OBL and al Qaeda and provided...

In this case, the office wife would be Secretary of State Incompetentalleezza Rice, in her former incarnation as the President’s National Security Advisor, who, we learn after the publication of Bob Woodward’s recent antidote to his earlier Bush hagiography, Dr. Rice seems to have… forgotten… critical details… like all of them… associated with a meeting in July, 2001 with CIA Director George Tenet urgently warning her of an impending Al Qaeda strike and begging her to alert the President (something else she seems to have forgotten to do.) In fairness to Secretary Rice, we tend to have what I’ll call...

The New York Times gives us this fascinating op-ed likening the recent outbreak of politically convenient cowardice in our own senate to that of the Roman senate circa 68 B.C. around the time of the great fire at Ostia. That fire included the burning of a Roman fleet and kidnapping of two senators by “pirates”. While I tend to view 9-11 as more reminiscent of the Reichstadt fire, apparently, this sort of “throw out all semblance of checks and balances, due process and, quite frankly, sanity, because civil rights don’t mean anything when we’re dead” (to paraphrase a recent screaming...

Amidst all our nation’s domestic mirth and merriment, Mrs. TD and I are pleased to celebrate our 15th wedding anniversary today (even if, for a short time, there was some doubt about the legal viability of our marriage, given its original situs.) So, let me wish a most happy anniversary to Mrs. TD.

While Will Rogers always said that no citizen was safe while the Congress was in session, any claim to humor in that remark was duly eviscerated when the august body, the United States Senate, duly caved to the President’s demand to “try” poor schmucks that he calls “terrorists” arbitrarily (if at all), detain them forever, and insulate anyone who would abuse them (i.e. himself) from later prosecution, and passed this abomination of a bill, making us, officially, the only nation in the world to legally and officially sanction torture. BTW, there is nothing stopping the application of this “law” (the...

Our buddy and AmStreet head muckity muck Kevin urges us to take a look at his piece summing up the call among people of conscience (i.e. Democrats and Independents) for the immediate release of both so-called “National Intelligence Estimates” pertaining to the Iraq War, so that the President can’t “nuance” his way out of the ultimate conclusion that his boneheaded decision to invade Iraq and his even more boneheaded mismanagement of that invasion made the problem of terrorism worse. Not so hard, is it? And I am reminded of having sat through a legal seminar at work on the subject...

The Grey Lady treats us to this year’s principal GOP winning strategy: arbitrary enforcement of voter identification requirements. On the surface, one recognizes that someone just has to prove who they are for just about everything in our security crazed country (including frequently entry into private office buildings), so why not “prevent fraud” in voting? I agree. Why not? Well… the overwhelming majority of reported incidents of fraud occur with respect to absentee ballots (as the article notes). Absentee ballots, frequently people living abroad, in the military, traveling, etc., are overwhelmingly (at least historically) Republican voters. And yet, the i.d....

We’ve, of course, been harping on the themes that the GOP wiill be relying upon to victory in maintaining control of both houses of Congress around 44, 45 days from now, including (obviously) first and foremost torture and star chambers, with Big Brother surveillance next week… all, you know, to keep us safe. BTW, given the USA intelligence report out that shows that we have made the threat of terrorism far, far worse thanks to our Iraq invasion; according to reports of the National Intelligence Assessment reported upon by the Grey Lady, it appears that AQ and other terrorist threats...

What’s old seems to be new again. Flush from the sudden goodwill from being almost certainly about to be exonerated-by-legislation for his own (and his associates’ and underlings’) war crimes, the President has now moved on to that tried and true Rovian tactic: accuse the Democrats of being the party of higher taxes. No, not even I can believe it either… but that’s the theme and the pose he is taking, and it would seem that this may be the full extent of Republican “domestic policy”. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: you just have to admire...