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

TD Blog Interview with Eric Lewis

Eric Lewis is a partner at the Washington, D.C. law firm of Lewis Baach, PLLC. Mr. Lewis previously represented four British nationals detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and currently represents a Pakistani national detained at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. On April 19, 2013, I had the privilege of interviewing Mr. Lewis by telephone. What follows are my interview notes, as corrected by Mr. Lewis. The Talking Dog: Where were you on Sept. 11, 2001? Eric Lewis: I was in London. I was the U.S. counsel to the liquidators of BCCI, and I was working on that case. At that...

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WTF?

Two bombs exploded near the finish of yesterday’s Boston Marathon, killing at least three people (including an eight year old boy), and injuring around 120 people. The results of the explosions included numerous amputations (including loss of limbs… in some cases involving runners who were just completing their dream-of-a-lifetime race, only to have their legs blown off, and/or their loved ones maimed or killed). Not quite as well-reported here, an American “off target” bomb managed to kill over 30 people at an Afghan wedding, during more ongoing and pointless carnage… somewhere else. Total casualties of killed and injured were believed...

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Aspirations of the day

Ordinarily the 1st of April is a high note here at the talking dog; but events of 2013 have taken a lot of wind out of a lot of sails… even ours. Speaking of sailing, Candace at least has a happy thought for the day…

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March Madness

I’m pleased to report that the simple expedient of downloading Google Chrome has addressed my home blogging woes. For those of you who are still there. The post title does not refer to, say, Harvard, the university with the largest endowment in the universe, finally spending enough money to get a basketball team capable of winning an NCAA tournament game. But it’s close to that. For our link today, we’ll go with this LATimes piece that could be called “the rich are different– they have more money.” Its theme, unsurprisingly, is that people of means (defined as say 8 digits...

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Happy St. Pat’s

Still having “technical problems” with the home server… but one of these days… as the Governator said… I’ll be back. We’ll comment further on “the sequester,” the new Dow Jones high, the elevation of torture mavens to CIA director and Tea Party Senators (literally) standing up for the Constitution, and the rest of the topsy turvy alignment of our political universe, and its economic overlords, and my standard ongoing advice (stock up on food and water, learn edible gardening, lower your expectations)… remains in effect. Cheers.

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Happy new year… or something

Yes, it’s 2013. We’ve survived December 21st, when various perversely optimistic hucksters were telling us we would all be “saved” from our humdrum, unsatisfying existences by the ultimately grand cosmic gesture of an Apocaplypse as predicted by some incorrectly deciphered Mayan calendar. Most of us survived “Superstorm” Hurricane Sandy, which, as predicted by so many for so long, demonstrated what the effect of raising the world’s sea-levels and ocean temperatures by willy-nilly burning everything that would burn as fast as possible in the name of… what, again?… would do to storm intensity and resulting damage, when a storm finally hit...

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Nothing

I have nothing to say, nothing to add, nothing… NOTHING. What can you say after a tragedy like the shooting up of six and seven year old kids, leaving twenty of them dead along with six adult members of their school staff in Newtown, CT yesterday. Well, the White House tells us “this is not the day to talk about gun control.” No. Of course not. Why would it be? After all… this isn’t Britain, where one similar incident at a school in Dunblane, Scotland resulted in the banning of virtually all private hand guns in the country ( country...

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Millions for paranoia, not one red cent for…

Anything that might help anyone, excepting the military [and the other components of the ruling class.] And so, amidst the fake crisis we’re told is a “fiscal cliff,” the Republican House has nonetheless found some money and voted to provide lifetime Secret Service protection to all living Presidents (right now, Democrats outnumber Republicans three [Obama, Clinton and Carter] to two [Bush Pere and Dubya])… but paranoia has bipartisan consensus. [the change, btw, is that current law provides for Secret Service protection for up to ten years after the President leaves office; this will provide such protection for life of the...

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