The Talking Dog "Sure, the dog can talk…but does it say anything interesting?" He ain't The Man's best friend

One long national nightmare ends… another begins

President-Elect Donald Trump. I suppose I should measure anything I say quite carefully after that; I’m still exhausted, having run a marathon three days ago, and then spent over 13 hours on my feet yesterday at a polling place in Philadelphia yesterday, as part of a valiant, but clearly inadequate effort on the part of Hillary Clinton (who was mucking around in Arizona while not defending her flank in the old rust belt, thereby vindicating the analysis of Michael Moore, who predicted this, and in this way.) The women in my life are extremely unhappy today… but… but… more White...

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Anxious Times

As we await the outcome of an election in which the favored-by-pre-election-polling candidate would go on to become our nation’s first female President (and I’ll be in Philadelphia tomorrow doing my small part to help that happen)… it’s time to take a moment to say goodbye to our nation’s first female attorney general, Janet Reno, who just passed away at age 78. Ms. Reno, who served during the entire eight years of Bill Clinton’s presidency, had her share of controversies, but in the view of this former employee of the United States Department of Justice (that would be me) she...

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Oh joy

I’m not at all deterred from my intention, as I have done in 2006 and 2008, to travel to Pennsylvania on Election Day as part of the Democratic Party legal team monitoring polling activity, notwithstanding the alleged plans of “White nationalists” to deploy their own poll watchers intent on intimidating non-White voters. Interestingly, for the moment, at least for people like me [White, upper middle class, regularly employed…] , this is still mostly a free country, and, while I have more problems with her than I can count, if Hillary Clinton is elected, I can at least be assured that...

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Pussy-gate indeed?

The Grey Lady treats us to a snapshot of Trump supporters in rock-ribbed right-wing Colorado Springs who suggest that they expect an insurrection if Hillary Clinton wins the election, and, despite often being gun owners… don’t think they’ll be part of said insurrection… indeed, as Kevin Drum notes, saying they themselves definitively won’t do anything. Anyway… that tends to be my ultimate view of the significance of the bipartisan fear-mongering surrounding what the other side will do should the election not go their way… that being… not much. A peaceful transition of power, simply by default. The biggest wahoo Trump...

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Happy Birthday Hillary Clinton

Secretary Clinton shares her birthday (today being her 69th) with a number of other notables, including game-show-host-who-isn’t-Donald-Trump Pat Sajak, Charlie’s Angel Jaclyn Smith, the late Gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, French Revolutionary Georges Danton, actors Bob Hoskins, Cary Elwes and Dylan McDermott, and a talking dog. Happy birthday, all.

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Future Schlock

We’ll start with this Gizmodo piece noting the potentially “bleak future” assuming the ever-more-regular event of massive hacks and denial-of-service attacks of intermediate/wholesale internet operators, such as this week’s attack on a company called “Dyn” that took down quite a number of popular internet sites. I note that as recently as today, I myself received notification (presumably as did 46 million other people) of a data breach associated with a company I never heard of called “Modern Business Solutions,” which, unbeknownst to me or anyone else, is some kind of “leaky bucket of the internet,” that our data seems to...

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Sympathy for the Devil

The “big takeaway” from last night’s third (and, thank God, final) Presidential debate of 2016 was, of course, Donald “the Donald” Trump’s refusal to agree in advance to abide by the results of the election (presuming, of course, that, please God, he loses); indeed, the Grey Lady’s take on it is Mr. Trump has contempt for democracy. I will just say this: show me the part of the Constitution that obliges Mr. Trump to “personally accept” the results of an election– indeed, any election (one of the bases for his popularity among a certain set, for example, is his steadfast...

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And then there were sixty

Each GTMO prisoner release is another victory; the latest is pretty big, as best-selling author Mohamedou Ould Slahi has been released from Guantanamo to his home country of Mauritania; Andy has more on this happy development for Mr. Slahi. I previously interviewed one of Slahi’s attorneys, Nancy Hollander; that interview may be found here. Slahi’s long and quite-literally-tortured tale is laid out in his best-selling book, Guantanamo Diary. With barely ninety days left in Barack Obama’s Administration, there are sixty prisoners left, of whom ten are subject to military commissions, and, if I’m not mistaken, twenty are cleared for release…...

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