No real surprises yesterday in the big ones (NJ, VA, NYC), where Republicans swept. Most interesting was my fair city’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who won by a much narrower margin than anticipated, despite outspending challenger Bill Thompson by something like $100 million to $8 million. NJ and VA, being uniquely states with gubernatorial races the year after Presidential races, frequently vote against the party in the White House, and this year was no exception. And in NYC, Mike Bloomberg is actually a Democrat who cynically ran as a Republican to cut through the professional pols on the Dem side, and...

Although today’s ING NYC Marathon marked my 25th marathon distance race (and 9th consecutive New York City Marathon), it was the first time I ran a distance longer than the 26.2 miles, having elected to add a 3.5 mile or so jog to the Staten Island Ferry, and then a 3.5 mile or so jog from the ferry to the start at Fort Wadsworth. It’s hard to believe that a 5 or 5 1/2 hour marathon distance race is a “comfort zone,” but after dozens of such in the last few years… it ends up working out that way. And...

I don’t want to talk about health care, Palin, grocery baggers teabaggers, Bloomberg, Corzine, Deeds, Karzai, Abdullah, Iraq, Guantanamo, torture, the current jobless job-loss recovery… or, quite frankly, much else. Heck, I don’t even want to talk about tomorrow’s ING NYC Marathon (your talking dog’s ninth in a row), where, to prepare for the upcoming JFK-50, I’ll probably add a jog (plus ferry ride) to the start. No, no, no… like our kittens, I’m going to try to live “in the moment.” One of the highlights of our civilization is the creation of a really good holiday for children. (Say...

Regular readers know that on this blog… it’s always about me. And hence, you get to hear about Mrs. TD taking me out to dinner for my birthday (joining other 10-26’ers as Hillary Clinton, Pat Sajak, Jaclyn Smith, and on some calendars… Leon Trotsky)… at not merely the same restaurant, but we are told at least, the very same table as my more famous and more powerful college classmate and his wife on their “date night.”. And speaking of him… the Grey Lady has issues with the seeming embrace of teh national security state… and as always, Glenn Greenwald has...

An occasional theme here is the sheer wondrousness of the military-industrial-Congressional-entertainment complex, the vast organic conspiracy between big money and our Government to make sure that Government operates to make sure that it operates in the interests of big money (and not in the interests of, well… anyone else). A case in point is what ls likely to happen to “the Franken Amendment,” a popular (it passed the Senate 68-30, with lots of support in the House as well) measure offered by Minnesota’s new junior senator Al Franken that would limit the ability of federal military contractors to shield themselves...

No, I’m not talking about baseball. I’m talking about the Supreme Court of the United States taking its fourth major Guantanamo detainee related case, Kiyemba, a case that stands for nothing short of whether when the Supreme Court makes a ruling of Constitutional magnitude that a feckless Congress and a faithless President (two faithless Presidents in this case) simply don’t like… that ruluing can be made meaningful. Simply put, Ricardo Urbina, a federal district judge in Washington, following the Supreme Court’s ruling in Boumediene, held that a group of (then 17, now… less than that!) Uighur detainees from China, who...

I don’t know what to say, other than my heart goes out to the families of those involved in the three deaths at this year’s Detroit Free Press/Flagstar Marathon. Last week, the death of a 23 year old man at the Baltimore Marathon at the 25th mile (around 2 hours or so before I reached that point) marked at least the fourth time in which I have been involved in a race with at least one fatality (last year’s ING New York Marathon had two). One of the Detroit deaths– a man in his 60’s who evidently fell on his...

Is right twice a day. And while not right quite that often, when no less a troubling figure than former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan “I know all about the financial precipice and debacle we are in because I CAUSED it” Greenspan tells us that big banks should be broken up, it’s kind of like if the CEO of ExxonMobil complained about the difficulties of oil drilling under all that extra water that for some reason got so deep lately … in other words, it’s doubtless something we have to listen to, albeit, way, way too late, regardless of the...

Another day, another case alleging prisoners tortured and abused at the hands of the United States Government, and another assertion by the Obama Administration that the Bush Administration and its officials be shielded from such a suit. In this case, the lawsuit was brought by the families of two detainees who were found dead in their cells in 2006. While there is certainly legal “flux” in just how responsible the government might be legally in tense situations such as GTMO (or even stateside prison settings) where mental health starts to deteriorate and conditions go untreated, the Obama Administration makes it...

As last year’s winner Professor Paul Krugman tells us, with its choice of two social scientists, Indiana University’s Elinor Ostrum (first female Nobel economics laureate) and U.C. Berkeley’s Oliver Williamson for the Nobel economics medal, the Nobel committee was recognizing the preeminence of economic thought that dominated the field prior to World War II (and the Great Depression), to wit, a view that how institutions are formed, legal structures, incentives and so forth… matter, and that it’s not a bunch of mathematical econometric models (most of which don’t work anyway). In short, it seems, that with the world’s currently being...