On this, the fifteenth anniversary of the first post of this blog, following a blast in Manhattan’s Chelsea section that injured 29 (with a second homemade explosive device found four blocks away from the 23rd Street explosion), which, in turn, came on the heels of an explosion that, thankfully, didn’t injure anyone, along the course of a Jersey Shore 5-K race called the “Semper Five” (a fundraiser for Marine Corps related charity)… I ventured into Central Park for the NYC Marathon Tune-Up, an 18-mile footrace, this morning. [BTW, “ISIS” hasn’t claimed responsibility for either of those events, though an ISIS...

In the brief interregnum between 9-11+15 and the 15th anniversary of this blog (tomorrow, actually… not sure what, if anything, I’m going to say on the subject) we are presented with the inevitability of the march of time with the loss of one of the greats of American art, the playwright Edward Albee. Winner of the Tony and the Pulitzer, some of his best known works include Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Zoo Story, The American Dream, and The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? Like other geniuses of the modern era, Beckett and Ionesco (or O’Neill and Miller), Mr....

Alright, alright. I’ll quickly give you this Daily News piece noting that the Trump theme of “never give a sucker an even break” applies to the supposed reason that he received $150,000 in state funds following 9-11 for “business loss” (which may actually have been legitimate business loss at the time) which, being the compulsive liar that he is, he insisted on the campaign trail was for “charitable purposes” of some kind… and like virtually everything purportedly “good” that Mr. Trump says he did… the evidence seems scant. And so I can only say… damn it… even on 9-11 +...

Item: Right here in invariably-tolerant-Brooklyn [TM], a 32-year old woman with the all-American name of Emirjeta Xhelili decided to accost, attack and assault two hijab-wearing women pushing baby strollers, including nearly toppling over a stroller carrying a 15-month old baby, suggesting strongly that they get … out of America. Yes Ms. Xhelili is a proud Trump supporter, but… you know… Perhaps Ms. Xhelili is in that “basket of deplorables” to which Hillary Clinton attributes half of Trump supporters (the other half being people “just looking for change.”) Name calling… good strategy. Calling your opponents xenophobic racists really worked well with...

Such is the conclusion of the invariably sober Kevin Drum concerning the latest FBI revelations associated with “Hillary’s damned emails.” He does a thorough review, and concludes that it is as close to an exoneration of HRC and her handling of her emails as one will see anywhere. And yet, she is just such a terrible campaigner, that she just can’t spit out words similar to: “Look, I readily admit that ‘best practices’ were not followed, and in hindsight, certainly should have been, but there is a huge chasm between not handling your electronic communications in the most perfect state...

What I share with Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte is that I am a fabulously handsome thirty-two year old am an incredible athlete with a dozen Olympic swimming medals was mugged in Rio de Janeiro… in Lochte’s case, at gunpoint. Naturally, the Olympic organizers’ reaction was… to deny it even happened. Lots of good stuff going on at Rio– such as first time gold medals for Fiji (rugby) and Puerto Rico (women’s tennis), or Phelps and Ledecky and Biles and (f’ing eh!) Usain Bolt and Wayde van Niekerkand (the latter, a South African who just destroyed Michael Johnson’s 400 meter world...

We could start with “plagiarism” (of one’s supposed arch-nemesis at that!) But let’s go right to… well… this:

Hey, let’s all party like it’s 1968 1914 1848,,, damned if I know. WTF is going on in Turkey, with an apparent coup against the already-power-grabbing President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and presumably his merry Islamist friends, which seems to have been put down within hours, if not minutes… for one thing, the airports (at least the important ones) were not under the control of “rebels” and Erdogan himself–also conveniently unaccounted for by coup plotters– returned from a beach resort to Istanbul, to reassert “control.” Meanwhile, “senior” military leaders were behind the government, as was the opposition, and evidently, many people...

Perhaps adding another page to the terrorist play book, a truck driver in Nice, France piled through a crowd until he managed to kill at least 75, with at least another 100 injured, during the aftermath of fireworks to celebrate the annual Bastille Day holiday. One assumes that the Islamic State/ISIL/ISIS/whatever it’s called in French will soon be identified as responsible, with calls for increased assaults against that group in Syria notwithstanding that so much progress has been made in rolling it back that even Russian-American cooperation in Syria is possible (or, at least, Sec. of State Kerry is in...

Well, well, well… for those who thought that the National Rifle Association, at least to the extent of the professionals who do its public bidding, was little more than a money-grubbing arm of the culture wars, rather than any kind of “principled civil rights organization,” we have this hit piece on the NRA (as it were) from WaPo. Specifically, the piece notes the deafening silence of the NRA leadership on one of the clearest infringements on Second Amendment rights we have ever seen, to wit, the apparent summary execution (by a White police officer) of one Philandro Castle (a Black...