I’ll vaguely defer to this from Steve concerning a supposedly thwarted car bomb plot involving a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland, Oregon… though, of course, unlike Steve, I have no particular “admiration” for an FBI that devoted so much of its efforts to setting up some jerky native-Somali kid into a “terrorism” plot that he might or might not have otherwise engaged in (probably not, being my implication) rather than, you know, hunting down actual terrorists (either of the top two guys at al Qaeda might be nice). But hey… that’s just me. (For more of my thoughts on...

Happy Thanksgiving to you and your families; Brother Dmitri tells us what, as Americans, we should actually be thankful for. Of course, that said, one does marvel at thie timing of this. Just saying.

We’ll start with the preposterous moral/legal state we now find ourselves in, whereby the prospect of having a criminal trial for actual criminals is now so controversial, the Secretary of State has to defend it.. I remember back ’round a quarter century ago, when I personally had to take an oath upon joining the very same Department of Justice that is now asked to be the courtroom face of outrageous American governmental policies (like liquidation of enemies of the state, state secrets, the end of habeas corpus, etc., etc.)… and that oath required me to oblige myself to defend THE...

A former Guantanamo detainee was… wait for it… tried in a civilian court in New York City and… wait for it… he was acquitted of all but one count; he was convicted of one count of conspiracy to destroy government property. Ahmed Ghailani had actually been indicted by a New York federal grand jury before 9-11, for his role in the 1998 bombings of United States embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in which hundreds were killed, including a dozen American nationals. Key rulings by federal U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan included the blocking of a key...

To Mrs. TD!!!

I’ll defer to Krugman for this explanation of the President’s various failures in the economics front which led inexorably to the mid-term election results, to wit, an electorate with no love for Republicans handing them control of the House of Representatives anyway, because the President sold them out on everything they hold dear economic recovery, both as a matter of style and as a matter of substance. And substance, especially. Professor Krugman nicely weaves in Obama’s bogus campaign themes that genuine hostility between the party of the richRepublicans and the other party of the rich, only less effective Democrats was...

Jim Henley gives us his take on the highjacking of Armistice Day by the forces of militarism and war-mongering, thereby investing the Newspeak holiday of “Veterans Day” with a creepy vibe that’s exactly the opposite of what was originally intended for the holiday. TD Sister sends us this Grey Lady piece on the legal, financial and other troubles encountered by a former coal baron trying to take on one of the most evil corporate empires in America (and as you know, that’s saying something). And in perhaps his greatest act of contempt yet for the City of which he is...

Marcy Wheeler gives us this report on events in a D.C. federal court before U.S. District Judge John Bates re: ACLU’s “next friend” suit viz Emmanuel Goldstein Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen targeted for death because he’s an extremely conveninet poster child for pushing the envelope he’s a bad man and evil incarnate should be wiped off the planet the President says so. Marcy notes that even the Government’s usual shamelessness on matters like this seems less enthusiastic, as “state secrets” was offered to the Court as “only a last resort”… and otherwise, more transparent lies were offered as a...

Amongst formerly trapped Chilean miner Edison Pena demonstrating the power of the human spirit, Subway sandwich shops’ pitchman “Jared” cheapening the whole thing by his commercial presence (fortunately, most media refused to cover him), and the usual world class super-elite runners (sadly, the world record holder and many people’s “greatest marathoner ever” Haile Gebrselassie announced his retirement after dropping out in the 16th mile; his countryman, Ethiopia’s Gebre Gebremariam won the men’s race and Kenya’s Edna Kiplagat won the women’s race, with American Shalane Flanagan taking second in her marathon distance debut), not to mention numerous other celebrities and 43,000...

It was pointed out to me by the young ‘un, and confirmed by Mrs. TD, that in Orwell’s 1984, the all-encompassing state used the mechanism of a state lottery as one of its numerous means to keep the proles in line; the lottery was extremely popular amongst the proles. State lotteries as of the 1940’s (when Orwell wrote 1984) were not all the rage as they are now; but as in so many things… Orwell was prophetic. It was once suggested to me in blog comments that 1984 was not intended as a manual. Well, whether or not it was...