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

Happy new year

I’ll get right to it for this 2011, and today’s amusingly one-tensive day (1/1/11): oil prices are going up, and hence, gasoline prices are going up. The Global Recession [TM] kept a lid on things for a while, but China ain’t getting any less industrial, and it needs to buy oil, and it is. So some time during this calendar year, many if not most Americans can expect to pay over $4 per gallon for gasoline… which is only the beginning, as virtually all relevant commodities– from heating fuel and electricity, to food, to all goods that have to be...

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Snow job

It’s nice to see our Lord Mayor “take responsibility” for a series of acts bordering on criminal indifference on his part associated with the City of New York’s utter inability to clear most of its streets following this weekend’s mega-blizzard (interestingly, the 20 or so inches that were recorded in Central Park were the sixth highest total ever recorded, but the second-highest this year, after February’s 26 inch fall). Still… the Lord Mayor’s sudden humility on this seems… disingenuous. To be fair, in my dozen years in Brooklyn, this was the hardest I’ve ever had to work in terms of...

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Dep’t of more of same and redundancy dep’t

Having blown his “close Guantanamo within a year” promise (and well before then, of course, sacking White House counsel Larry Greg Craig for having the audacity to make him publicly state the promise in the first place)… the Obama Administration proposes an “executive order for permanent detention”… which… is kind of exactly where we are now… isn’t it? Some four dozen men would still be too-dangerous-to-release-but-too-tortured-to-prosecute, trials would have to be by military commission… oh, but there would be some kind of meaningless “review process”… perhaps even every year! As with the terms “enemy combatant” and “war on terror”… the...

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Nothing personal, just business

Attorney David Coombs, counsel to one [ex-?]-PFC Bradley Manning justs wants to give you “a day in the life” of Private Manning. I won’t go into much more detail (Mr. Coombs does that himself… read the link if you want it), but Private Manning is required to sit in his rather small cell (and sit it is… he will be stopped from any form of exercise) for 23 hours a day or so, then allowed for a figure-8 walk in a concrete room for up to an hour a day, with limited opportunity to read, watch television, write to approved...

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America *&^%’n A

The Grey Lady treats us to the comedy stylings of Tom “the billionaire” Friedman. The title is a reference to the former President of Costa Rica imploring the world (that would be, of course, the United States) to “do something” about climate change, because there is no “Plan B” for the planet; Friedman conflates this to note there is no “America B” (forgetting that, of course there is an America A and B: the America A of the uber-privileged people sitting on mega-millions, such as… Tom Friedman himself.,. and the America B of the rest of us, where even the...

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Public displays of deflection

Well, the L.A. Times gives us this editorial suggesting that “Guantanamo Must Go,” in the case of the editorial, specifically opposing adoption by the Senate of a poison pill slipped into a recent Defense Authorization Bill by the House of Representatives that would preclude funding of transfer of Guantanamo detainees to the United States even for war crimes trials… though, Congress’s fecklessness in this area is even ahead of that of the Obama Administration’s. Which takes us around 200 miles South of my usual haunt in Brooklyn (and my workplace in the shadow of Ground Zero), where, in a case...

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NOW it all makes sense!

For our first ever embedded video, we at TTD thought we would use the occasion to explain to you something fundamental about the nature of (our college classmate) President Barack Obama, as he, once again, in not only selling out the rest of us to keep the Bush millionaire tax cuts, but to de-fund social security too..(and even more troublingly, to be pissy about it). behaves bizarrely if one thinks we were going to get that “hopey changey” thing… but perfectly reasonably if one realizes that he is just a guy doing the job that hedge fund guys put him...

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Fantasy-league “hardball”

I actually like the mechanics of this proposal from Professor Jack Balkin, which he terms a form of “constitutional hardball”. The proposal, in a nutshell, is to by-pass Congress altogether– let all of the Bush tax cuts expire (as they are scheduled to do absent Congressional action, in less than 27 days), and then unilaterally declare an executive “payroll tax holiday”– as a matter of national emergency– ordering the Treasury Secretary to refuse to collect the highly regressive federal payroll taxes, and then daring Congress (presumably the Republican House) to sue him. The problem with this is fairly obvious, and...

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Wiki wakey

Among the massive load of State Department internal communications that were the subject of the most recent document release by Wikileaks (if Barack Obama refuses to honor his promise of “transparency in government, it seems that Julian Assange of Wikileaks is going to do it for him… by the way, if Julian Assange isn’t “the man of the year,” you got me as to who is)… is a comment by State Department officials that public enemy number one that terrorist former GTMO prisoner Moazzam Begg was doing the United States’ work for it in speaking throughout Europe in an effort...

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