The Grey Lady and the WaPo give us their accounts of detainee treatment agreements reached between Senators McCain, Warner and Graham, and the White House. I have a pretty good idea what the bills are about (stripping jurisdiction from federal courts to hear habeas corpus writs, and ostensibly trying to provide the dictatorial tools Cheney wants by Congressional rubber stamping what John Yoo had previously told the President he could do by “unitary executive” fiat)… they are about denying any semblance of a fair trial to terror suspects, they are about wink-winking to torture carried out by the CIA, and...

Let me quote Bill Scher (author of “Wait! Don’t move to Canada!“), who I interviewed, just one post down: As to national security, this is another matter. What we really need to do is lay out our foreign policy principles and what we want to achieve globally. One area is promoting democracy– that is a key liberal goal and principle, to be sure. And George W. Bush SAYS the same thing– HE wants to promote democracy. Ah, but he doesn’t DO it. And we can point to example after example, from condoning a military dictatorship in Pakistan, helping to oust...

Abdullah al-Amiri, the chief judge in Saddam Hussein’s genocide trial, was removed by the Iraqi government (that we prop up and otherwise control) for suggesting that Saddam “was not a dictator” during the trial. He has been reassigned to hear other cases. You will recall that here in the United States, when judges attempt to administer justice impartially under the law without concern to popular outcry or political interference, our senators (particularly Texas Republicans) prefer to incite violence against them. In Iraq, they (hopefully) will only remove the judge from the case. In the “new democratic Iraq,” the judge is...

That’s right; the first post is dated September 18, 2001, with the World Trade Center then still smoldering. Indeed, this blog is so old, its beginnings pre-date the general use of the term “blog”; indeed, it is arguably the oldest “liberal” blog… assuming anyone accepts that it even is a liberal blog… TTD has even become a source of material for the regular media (at least, if you call NPR “regular media”.) As to the world at large… things seem to have changed a great deal over the last five years… or have they? I’m still happily married to the...

There’s no other way to describe what the President is proposing with respect to the abominable plans he has to ratify his heretofore unlawful military commission scheme, and to “clarify” American law vis a vis the Geneva Conventions. With less than two weeks to go, we have a Congress that hasn’t passed so much as a single budget appropriation bill, and yet, has time to spend over this wedge issue. Naturally, most Americans will not be told, for example, that prior to the Abu Ghraib photos being published in April, 2004, all American troops captured in Iraq were returned alive;...

In the brief window of time before the mid-term elections during which the Republican Congress is back in session to try to pass a few more wedge bills into wedge laws, one of the doozies was approved today in the Senate Judiciary Committee: legislation ostensibly ratifying the President’s (heretofore felonious) warrantless eavesdropping. Arlen Spector is proving to be an even more impressive poodle to the President than Tony Blair is; his prior “outrage” over the lawlessness of the Bush Administration at the expense of Americans’ constitutional rights has now given way to rubber stamping yon lawlessness. Further, Spector has all...

I had been hoping to tie Connecticut “insurgent” Democrat Ned Lamont and Rhode Island “insurgent” Republican Steve Laffey, who happens to be the mayor of Cranston, R.I., together thematically, by asking “Who knows what evil lies in the hearts of the voters of New England?” The line, of course, from 1930’s radio, is “The Shadow Knows.” The Shadow was the alter ego of a character named… Lamont Cranston. Any set up of a punch line that takes that long is obviously a problem! So never mind: just know that with 70% of precincts in, incumbent GOP Senator Lincoln Chafee is...

I write this almost to the second that the first plane hit the North Tower over my left shoulder that fateful morning five years ago. As most of you know, I was then sitting at my desk on the 16th floor of 100 Church Street, with the post office building at 90 Church Street just below my window and the World Trade Center complex right past that. At that time, of course, I heard a sonic boom, a large pop, and an explosion, sat perplexed a second, and then looked over to see flames shooting out, and glass and paper...