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...

We’ll start with a rare running-related disappointment (my standards are low!)… an unprecedented involuntary DNF (“did not finish”) in yesterday’s JFK-50 miler… I failed to meet an intermediate time cut-off, and my day was over at mile 27.3; I might have met the 12 hour cut-off for the 50 miles, but just could not do that after 13 miles of extremely unpleasant Appalachian Trail terrain. Such is life. Genuine introspection to follow. And in a less surprising disappointment, see my prior post, ___ at last. For various reasons, that’s all I’ll say on the subject. This has been… “disappointments.”

This post over at Scotusblog explains why the post that was here (and should still be here) isn’t here anymore. That’s pretty much all I can say on the subject. We should at least have the presence of mind to recognize our worst fears: after a seemingly interminable, dark eight years of the Bush Administration, we finally elected a Democratic President, believing that he would even remotely keep to the spirit, if not to the letter of his core promises re restoration of the rule of law. He did no such thing. The only thing he has proven effective at...

To Mrs. TD.

On this Friday the 13th (that we wish Andy a happy return to the Mother Country; we were delighted to host him at Stately Dog Manor as he brought his wonderful film “Outside the Law” to its North American debuts), we’ll start with news of Andy’s appearance on Democracy Now! which fortuitously coincided with the day’s big news, that Ron Jeremy Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and four others allegedly implicated in master-minding the 9-11 attacks will be tried in federal court in New York City. Unfortunately, the announcement coincides with plans to try five others in the rightly much maligned kangaroo...

A plethora of non-bloggy obligations has slowed posting down to… none-existent, come to think of it! Well then… The Grey Lady gives us this op-ed comparing the judicial reactions to two “extraordinary renditions,” one from an Italian court that convicted nearly two dozen defendants for the (unbelievably brazen broad daylight) kidnapping of Abu Omar off of the streets of Milan (to a dungeon in Egypt), and the other in my fair city, where the Second Circuit of Appeals dismissed the civil suit brought by Canadian kidnap victim Maher Arar (to a torture chamber in Syria). Let’s just say that the...