Krugman suggests, simply, “pass the bill.” This, of course, is the flawed “health care reform” bill. I will just say that the Senate bill, if anything gets passed, can be reconciled with the inconsistent House bill, and then a bill, by no means good but better than the crap that is left in the Senate bill, can be rammed through via the 51-votes-needed reconciliation process, if the President and the majority leadership have the cojones to do things the way Bush and the Republicans did for years. And, as Krugman notes, the bill can be improved in years to come…...

It seems that any meeting of human beings to engage in anything constructive will quickly be highjacked by the jocks, cheerleaders, kewl-kidz and the assorted others whose daddies bought them shiny new Beemers… while the rest of us have to cower in the corner, waiting for the approval of the “important people.” We just saw that happen with “health care reform.” And similarly, it seems, the Copenhagen global climate change summit seems to be going… nowhere. For those, like me, who believe in pursuing lost causes (out of boredom if nothing else) our friends at Avaaz.Org have a massive world-wide...

All hail “GTMO North”… a prison in Thomson, IL (recently acquired by the federal government from the President’s home state of Illinois) will serve as the home gulag-away-from-home gulag for an as yet unknown number of prisoners now illegally detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Candace hasn’t told me if either or both of her clients might be moved there, as it would doubtless shorten her commute from Chicago, though it would otherwise mean little or nothing to the prisoners themselves, or to anyone else watching whether this country complies with its own laws under its “Constitutional Law Professor Senior Lecturer”...

A sense of humor is now an essential piece of survival equipment, and headlines like this continue to make me wonder if The Onion hasn’t gone on a massive acquisition binge of every other news organization on the planet. Since, if one is handsome and glib enough, and gets elected President while not being named “Bush” or “Clinton,” he now gets a “peace prize” for escalating a war (and more importantly– far more importantly– for failing to a God damned thing to end the pointless carnage in Iraq), I’m wondering how we can adequately honor the other two elements of...

The Grey Lady gives us this handy-dandy superficial overview of the Copenhagen U.N. climate meeting. There are “disagreements” between “poor nations,” “rich nations” and “newly industrializing nations” about the rather modest lifestyle changes needed (hint: drive smaller cars) in the first world to prevent an irreversible civilization-destroying climate change (hint: as ocean levels rise an almost certain 10 to 20 feet in the next 30-50 years, large parts of the world, such as most of New York City, for example, will be uninhabitably underwater). As is the custom of reporting these days, we are told things are “complicated.” I don’t...

To TD Daughter.

Even when I don’t fundamentally disagree with him, the President’s insistence on trying to appear “measured” and “careful” still manages to piss me off these days (possibly because he keeps fucking me and everyone who supported him with his outrageous stances on civil liberties and of course GTMO, et al.)… thus the big “Afghanistan speech” whereby he will up the ante by 30,000 more troops. I am consistently appalled by Democratic Congress members polluting my in-box seeking my money, who have thought nothing of fucking me themselves on virtually every issue I hold important but who then still have the...

This year of 2009 has been an amazing year for notable men of color… obviously, Barack Obama has led the charge as the first African American President… but after him, it seems to have been a tough year indeed. Poor Michael Jackson got a fatal overdose of some tranquilizer while trying to prepare for his comeback tour…and now Tiger Woods gets clocked on the head by his wife with his own golf clubs in a “car accident”… just saying. Where was I going with this? Oh yes… I was going to note that President Obama has done a complete 180...

This homily from Chris Dashiell pretty much sums up Western civilization (of which as Gandhi said, “I think it would be an excellent idea”) as succinctly and eloquently as anything I have ever read. And from “the sublime” to the… “less sublime…” Candace lightens up an otherwise dark era with this. Enjoy the remainder of your holiday weekend.

Greenwald tells us about the resignation of Phil Carter as the DOD official in charge of detainee affairs, a job once held by Cully Stimson. Carter, a former blogger and staunch critic of the Bush Administration’s detainee policies… got to watch the Administration he helped elect… adopt the same policies, lock, stock and barrel (only throwing in the element of going back to the loathsome Congress for even more dictatorial authority). Supposedly, Carter’s resignation, after less than a year in office, was for “personal” rather than “policy” reasons. Well, Carter, a lawyer and former Captain in the Army, is a...