Talk about “rhymes with witch”! Hillary Clinton is forced to take to the floor to condemn the latest rhetorical outrage by Ann Coulter, whose latest literary atrocity refers to four particularly outspoken 9-11 widows as “the witches of East Brunswick”, and insisting that the ladies “were enjoying their husbands’ deaths”. Condemning 9-11 widows for having the audacity to speak out against the government whose incompetence killed their husbands and rendered their children fatherless. This is the “kindler and gentler” nation that Poppy Bush envisioned. This is the “compassionate conservatism” of George Dubya Bush at its best. Only a fool would...

Bruce the veep forwards us this LA Times piece, discussing plans that are afoot in the Department of Defense to change the Army Field Manual to delete that part about avoiding degrading and humiliating prisoners (a/k/a compliance with the Geneva Conventinos on some things), in the interest of “flexibility” to “interrogate” terrorist suspects. The State Department, which has to deal with other countries, is duly outraged. The JAG Corps of military attorneys are apoplectic. But the Vice-President’s office wants these changes, and damn the torpedoes. Look for tortured-while-a-prisoner-of-war Senator John McCain, who introduced an anti-torture bill that became an “inadvertent”...

And so, with OBL (who?) still out there now four years and nine months after 9-11, with the war in Iraq generating over two thousand dead American service personnel, tens of thousands wounded, untold thousands of dead Iraqis, and hundreds of billions in costs of the war, with the federal deficit at record levels and only poised to get worse (as Congress debates eliminating the “Paris Hilton” tax, a/k/a the fairest, most efficient tax on the books, i.e., the estate tax), with National Guard troops being rushed to our Southern border, with terrorists apparently operating just north of our Northern...

Happy birthday to TD Mother-in-law, who is now 75 years young.

The facts are far from in, and in the end, as horrible as the events that took place in the Iranian town of Halitha (where it is alleged that American Marines massacred at least two dozen Iraqi civilians last November), we really don’t yet have a full picture of what has happened, and let’s just say in the fog of war, there are lots of grey areas… Still and all, new Iraqi PM Maliki has no choice but to demand a full investigation of the American forces even as they are propping his fragile government up, which he did… Needless...

One is hard-pressed to see the logic in the Department of Homeland Security’s decision to slash homeland security spending to… wait for it… New York and Washington (and to a lesser extent because it got so much to start with, New Orleans) so that more funds are available to “smaller cities” (to wit, places more likely to vote G.O.P.) Oh wait… the mid-terms are in November, D.C. doesn’t yet have a House seat (and when it does, its going Democratic) and New York, while it has some Republican House members (including that kvetch Peter King), none are likely to be...

In an interesting response to the loathsome Rev. Fred Phelps of Kansas, who enjoys traveling around the country and disrputing funerals of fallen servicemen as his own special way of gay-bashing, the President signed a law restricting protests of military funerals today (Memorial Day). At a knee-jerk level, one wonders why Mr. Phelps shouldn’t just be picked up, right now, and shipped to the brig as an “unlawful combatant” as were Jose Padilla and Saleh Al-Mari… frankly, Phelps is probably doing more to undermine the morale of American troops and their families than all of the detainees held in the...

And thus I arrive late in the all-important discussion of “net-neutrality,” or, specifically, legislative resistance to an initiative from telecoms to impose additional tolls on the use of the internet for their own bottom lines at the expense of the rest of us; in this case, a New York Times piece by Adam Cohen lays the issues out succinctly and in easy to comprehend terms. Short answer: AT&T and other telecoms feel that they are not making enough money, even though people like you and me already pay for (1) a web hosting service, (2) an ISP provider, (3) high-speed...

An adage ignored at their extreme peril by Enron poobahs and defendants Kenneth “Kenny Boy” Lay and Jeffrey Skilling at their trial in Houston, where each was convicted on virtually all of the charges associated with their role in the spectacular collapse of Enron. The jurors felt that each did himself a disservice by taking the stand: Kenny Boy’s childish outbursts showed that he was a control freak, not the kind of guy (like, say, someone else we know) who would just sit there obliviously content to just accept whatever he was told, while Skilling’s detailed bean-counting knowledge on some...