In the long run, we’re all dead, of course (a quote widely attributed to John Maynard Keynes). But… in the short run, some of us can go on “the long run”… anyway, to add to my 25 marathon finishes, we add yesterday’s USATF Championship/Caumsett Park 50-K, around 5 miles longer than a marathon. Only the showing up of five more people who hadn’t pre-registered kept me from an age group medal… bastards! While not quite expiating the demons of last year’s failed attempt at a 50-miler, it does, as Mrs. TD suggests, begin to put me in the realm of...

It’s all just a broken record at this point, but the President and his feckless Democratic allies (who f’ed not just all of us and the Constitution, but each other with their bigoted cowardice on Guantanamo and the war on terror) will ultimately reap what they have sown in terms of their service of the Bush Administration’s agenda come Election Day, when one, if not both houses of Congress will be returned to the Republicans, despite the fact that most people still hate them too. Thing is, it’s pretty automatic: if you try to do things that David Broder and...

The unbelievably severe earthquake centered near Concepcion, Chile has left at least 700 dead, with nearly 2 million displaced and God knows what else when the full extent is ascertained, As horrible as its ultimate toll is, at the end of the day, the earthquake will prove less destructive in Chile than last month’s quake in Haiti. Chile, the site of the most severe earthquake ever recorded, had instituted and actually implemented building codes to deal with earthquakes, and it is a far richer country than Haiti able to make sure of this (at least, far better able than Haiti…...

I have been lamenting of late that an America who derives its “nutrition” from twinkies, its “entertainment” from “reality television” and its state of being from prozac… is not going to be populated with the kind of people able to push-back when the forces of totalitarianism descend upon them. And hence, my never-ending quest to note the outrageous injustices being committed by our government in the name of “security” over and over again here always has a backdrop of a cowed people generally unwilling to do much, or anything, about them. Today, just a few minutes looking on Memeorandum, and...

An incredible career of being one of the greatest ass-kissers in the history of the American military– a guy who graduated in the bottom third of his West Point class who managed to quickly rise from lieutenant colonel to the rank of four star general in barely five years without even remotely being involved in anything resembling combat– and parlaying that and other roles into the virtual living embodiment of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Ruler of the Queen’s Navee“… comes to an end, as former Secretary of State Alexander Haig has passed away at 85. Like so many others, Haig’s most...

Just as Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” is pretty much the only reliable news source on American broadcast television, so it seems, it only has one reliable counterpart in the American print media, and “America’s Finest News Source” tells it like it is again, with this article, in which Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke finally lets us in on the dirty little secret of our culture: money is just a product of collective psychosis– an illusion. The fact is, gold bugs… try eating your gold when you get really hungry. It’s not just money (and precious metals) we’re deluded about– much of...

Former federal judge, solicitor general, law school dean and Clinton partisan hack tormentor “indepedent counsel” Kenneth Starr will assume the presidency of Baylor University, a Baptist university based in Waco, Texas. My immediate reaction was “how wonderfully convenient to the George W. Bush Presidential Library”… but a moment’s thought and I realized that’s Baylor’s athletic rival, SMU, over in Fort Worth. Starr had been dean at Pepperdine Univ.’s law school in Malibu, CA; to give up that there must be some bucks involved… but I have no doubt that the money’s good. For the Ken Starrs of the world… the...

Obviously, innocent people suffer and die in war (by the hundreds, thousands or millions… as Stalin said, one death is a tragedy and a million is a statistic and all…) In that sense, an “errant missile,” which has killed at least ten INNOCENT AFGHAN CIVILIANS, and let’s not even mitigate or that or sugarcoat for one second… that our military has INADVERTENTLY MASSACRED AT LEAST TEN PEOPLE who were no threat to it, or our nation, or anyone else… in the course of an offensive during which, PERHAPS, SOME TALIBAN MIGHT be picked off too… just shouldn’t be that big...

A nation that has already gone ahead and sacrificed its soul out of a chicken-shit fear that men it has (not always, but almost always wrongfully, btw) held without charge or trial for over eight years and counting “might some day somehow do something bad”… apparently isn’t very good at judging bad things done by actual bad people here… certainly when said people are white, well-educated and well-connected… Surprise, surprise, that Dr. Amy Bishop, the (accused) homicidal maniac who massacred the committee that denied her tenure at the University of Alabama Huntsville killing three and wounding three others, had previously.....

One wishes simply that I could say something about the Obama Administration other than “I’m disappointed, but not surprised.” And thus, the apparent decision to scrap civilian federal court trials of 9-11 plot suspects in New York, and quite possibly, relegate the trials of Ron Jeremy Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and four others to military commissions altogether. The apparent political subtext seems to involve hanging Attorney General Eric Holder out to dry, by blaming him for the White House’s decision to use the federal courts for its show trials in the first place, and of course, to propose the show trials...