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.

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...

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...

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…...

Seriously. We are, and have been, beyond parody. The next 27 days are going to be… anything but dull.

It seems a recording of Donald “the Donald” Trump has emerged, showing him making “lewd remarks.” Near as I can tell, the only thing more offensive (about what Mr. Trump said eleven years ago) than what he says (or tweets) on a daily basis is that he used “the P word” (I suppose if there were a recording of the Donald using “the N word,” that would be even worse). Got it: that’s what American life is, these days. Substance is irrelevant. We don’t go more than a micron below the surface of anything. The wrong word was used. The...

I exercise my privilege to write about things of particular interest to me, noting the passing of Oscar Brand at age 96, a singer, song-writer, author, arranger and all-around good guy… and notably, the world’s longest running radio host, setting the world record for radio programs with a single host for his show “Folksong Festival”, which was on our local public radio station for over seventy years, debuting in December, 1945, seventeen years before I was born. Rest in peace, Oscar.

We’ll start with this semi-hit piece called “The Curious Case of Alicia Machado,” she the former Miss Universe from Venezuela whom Hillary Clinton invoked at this week’s presidential debate to highlight Donald “The Donald” Trump’s generalized contempt toward women, noting that he once referred to Ms. Machado as “Miss Piggy” and “Miss Housekeeping,” evident references to weight gain and Latina heritage. Trump, surprise surprise, has been fighting back, noting that Ms. Machado has “issues,” including a purported sex tape (turns out to be true and was evidently a basis for baseballer Bobby Abreu to break up with his then fiancee,...

The Hebrew word for hello, good bye and peace seems the appropriate notation for the death, at age 93, of Shimon Peres, former Israeli prime minister (often considered the best of Israel’s leaders in the technical sense of competent leadership, although he was rarely the most popular), as well as holding a number of cabinet positions, and late in his life, the figure-head president of the State of Israel. Mr. Peres was a prime mover for most of the modern peace initiatives that formed the seemingly never-ending “Israeli Palestinian Peace Process [TM],” but, as the last of the founding generation...

Donny Trump, Jr., The Younger Donald (TM) has been on a tear lately , appealing to White supremacists ,and neo-nazis galore, sayeth Media Matters. The latest, comparing a handful of hypothetical Skittles from a bowl containing three poison ones to Syrian refugees, an “analogy” which originated in the Nazi propaganda machine, is, evidently, just the latest in a rather loud and clear appeal to this particular demographic (i.e. White supremeacists and neo-Nazis). I hearken back to my own post from June, noting the uncanny comparisons between Trump rallies and Nuremberg-style rallies of an Austrian-born dictator of the not too distant...