One might be inclined to read something into the unusually strong statements by Great Britain’s Attorney General calling for the (apparently immediate) closure of the American extra-legal extra-constitutional gulag detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Lord Goldsmith observed that Guantanamo had become a universal symbol of injustice– a stark living source of cognitive dissonance from the usual American image as a beacon of freedom. For his part, George Bush’s Pet Poodle U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair usually notes that it might be “premature” to release “dangerous people” from Gitmo… Lord Goldsmith’s statements were noteworthy for evading that usual weasel qualification....

I’ve been somewhat remiss in not earlier mentioning the latest Bush Administration demonstration of why it feels that, seeing as its actions are unchecked by either Congress, the courts, or the voters, it can do what it wants… especially for the purpose of playing games with live cases in those occasional instances where the courts might just do something adverse to it, usually on the eve of some important court date. The latest fiasco, of course, involves a group of five ethnic Uighurs (Chinese Moslems from far west Xinxiang province, or Sinkiang back when I learned geography) who were, almost...

Less than a week after being sentenced to life imprisonment at the most unpleasant federal super-max in Florence, Colorado, convicted 9-11 plotter Zacarias Moussaoui filed a surprise motion seeking to vacate his guilty plea. The Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure Rule 11 would not permit a withdrawal of a guilty plea after sentencing, and Judge Leonie Brinkema immediately so held. Doubtless, Moussaoui will appeal to a most unsympathetic 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond. Moussaoui now says “I was lying” when he previously swore out a lengthy affidavit as to his involvement in the 9-11 plot as part of...

There is a reason the Onion (America’s finest news source) has migrated to our sidebar: stories like this one, about Mexicans fleeing the United States to return to Mexico so they can obtain good American jobs there.

We’ll compare and contrast op-eds this morning (and then tell you why both are right for the wrong reasons!) The first is by TNR‘s Jonathan Chait in the Los Angeles Times, concerning why Democrats are… misguided… to try to oust Senator Joe “Joementum” Lieberman. The second is by the Daily Kos‘s blogging sensation Markos Moulitsas writing in the Washington Post concerning why Hillary Clinton can’t win. Chait’s basic premise and Moulitsas’ (btw, it appears that letting Kos have an op-ed may be the beginnings of “pay-back” for the Ben Domenech fiasco… just sayin’…) are more or less opposite sides of...

A federal jury in Alexandria, Virginia declined to accede to the bloodlust of our Imperious Leader and refused to impose a death sentence on convicted 9-11 plotter Zaccarias Moussaoui. As a result of this legally correct verdict, following a government prosecution rife with misconduct and a virtually impossible burden given FBI agent testimony that no matter what Moussaoui said, Bureau chieftains could not be convinced of the merits of a 9-11 plot, Moussaoui will be automatically sentenced to life in prison. And there we have it. Frankly, I have no brief for Mr. Moussaoui who has, I believe sincerely, told...

Neither rain, nor sleet, nor snow, nor 36% approval ratings, nor over 2,400 dead U.S. troops in Iraq, nor record high gasoline prices, nor most especially a record high federal budget deficit poised only to get worse can stop these Republicans from their appointed rounds of tax-cuts for America’s most affluent, today, a $70 billion extension of 2003 tax cuts on dividends, capital gains, and other measures intended to be redistributive toward those most affluent, while affording minimal tax relief to anyone else, though of course, pressure to slash social spending will increase. The GOP official statement is that it...

Senator Joseph Biden (D-MBNA) joins with former Council on Foreign Relations chairman Leslie Gelb to write an op-ed in the Grey Lady to… wait for it… suggest that Iraq be divided administratively into its three religio-ethnic (Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish) regions. Jebus. Never heard that before… except perhaps here… I, of course, make no claim to original thinking on this point… It has really been an issue since the British and French smashed Iraq together shortly after World War I out of ethnically mutually-hostile pieces of the defeated Ottoman Empire… Of course, this sort of internal break-up was the subject...

That observation was famously by the late John Maynard Keynes; the economist believed to be the greatest of all Keynesians, American giant John Kenneth Galbraith (for more reasons than his 6’8″ stature.) has died, at age 97. Galbraith gave our vocabularies terms like “conventional wisdom” and “countervailing power,” he gave our libraries The Affluent Society, he gave our nation service as an advisor of Presidents from FDR to Clinton, and as Ambassador to India in the 1960’s, and he gave academia decades of service as an economics professor at Harvard, not to mention numerous seminal works of economics, including probably...

And so we find ourselves starting to reach down to characters like Barnyard Dawg, protector of the chicken-house from such predators as right wing chickenhawk Henery Hawk, and Southern blowhard rooster (my guess is a Zell Miller-type DINO) Foghorn Leghorn. Some of you have suggested that I consider Snoop Doggy Dogg for this feature, but I have learned that he is not a talking dog at all, but a rather troubled human being. Hence, the rap on him is he ain’t a dog… sorry Snoop fans. The thing with Barnyard Dawg is, like other Warner Brothers talking dogs such as...