A.P. reports that 87 House Democrats joined their brethren cavemen on the Republican side of the aisle for a resounding 258-163 non-binding resolution win against transferring Guantanamo-based detainees to the American mainland, even in maximum security prison conditions. Unsurprisingly, the Republican quoted refers to those still held at GTMO as terrrrrrorists. But David Obey, a Democrat from Wisconsin believes our prisons are tough enough for “these thugs.” Thing is, even under convoluted rules where any evidence at all and the government wins, GTMO detainees have won 30 out of 38 habeas cases that have gotten that far, with some of...

The Times of London treats us to an interview with Gore Vidal, in which the great American writer says that, as smart as Obama is, he’s not up to the job and Vidal [a relation of Al Gore] says he should have backed Hillary because she at least understands the world at large better… oh, and the United States will likely be a dictatorship soon. Oh… and he’s really bitter. (I was perplexed by mention of his correspondence with Timothy McVeigh, who he called “a patriot”… I suppose it’s like Norman Mailer… American men of letters are supposed to adopt...

Via digby, we learn from this HuffPo piece about the thoughts of Neil Barofsky, the Treasury Department’s man in charge of the Troubled Assets Recovery Program (TARP). You all remember TARP, the much vaunted program by which quite literally all the money in the world was sucked out of possible productive uses to prop up our successful financial system, so that necessary reforms wouldn’t be implemented, we could have “business as usual,” and so that the banking sector, whose problem was the concentration of insanely high market share in a few institutions, would end up being consolidated into even fewer,...

My friend and colleague Thomas Nephew leads off the substantive discussion of Benjamin Wittes’ “Law and the Long War” with this dead-on discussion of the opening introductory section. [Thomas’s introductory post is here; mine can be found here.] Mr. Wittes’s bio makes no indication that he has a law degree or legal training. In that sense, then, he may not quite understand just what he did wrong in the “opening statement” part of his “introduction,” specifically why it’s so disturbing to those of us whose lives are devoted to “the law as it is” on the ground in the courts...

Check out this brilliant exigesis from Club Orlov for unconventional (and hence accurate) observations of the recent Overweight Middle-aged White People’s March on Washington. Dmitri, man, all I can say is “We are not worthy…”

Well, one could argue that those are the twin themes of this blog, which celebrates its eighth anniversary, today. It’s also the title of a tome by legal commentator Benjamin Wittes, a tome suggesting the controversial premise that our current laws aren’t sufficient for the “all new unique to the history of the world conflict against terrorism” we are facing… and so, new ones are needed. Well, I’m delighted to report that my colleague and friend Thomas Nephew of the great Newsrack blog and I will be taking on the task of analyzing Mr. Wittes’s book, chapter by chapter, more...

A new study has concluded that an average of 45,000 Americans die prematurely each year from a lack of health insurance coverage. Given that there are 45 million Americans who are uninsured (plus or minus illegal aliens… Congressman Joe Wilson wants you to know that it’s a.o.k. with him if they die in the streets like animals, even if not treating them results in infectious diseases spreading to, you know, White people… and other catastrophes, just so long as you-know-who continues to be screwed by the system)… that means it would take around 1,000 years to do God’s work and...

In works of Shakespeare and in other “sensitive” human contexts (such as… dictatorships) the only character permitted to speak the actual truth is the fool or the jester. In keeping with that tradition, the Grey Lady permits us to hear an uncomfortable truth (or perhaps tells itself, since we have known for quite a while) through the vehicle of the usually “lighthearted” Maureen Dowd. That unpleasant truth is that the binding and driving motivation of extremists from Joe Wilson to the Scaife/Coors, et al. sponsored “teabaggers”… is… wait for it… racism. Shocking, I know. But millions of Americans just want...

The Grey Lady treats us to “a year later view of Wall Street.” And the picture looks… surprisingly similar to what it did a year ago. Except now everyone is more convinced that the government will step in to bail them out of bad decisions (from which the “haves” such as Goldman Sachs may continue to benefit from the upside) than they were during “the crisis” when there was, at least, the possibility that the government would not. Which just means that many economists, including some who have been right about the dot-com and housing bubbles, see the next inevitable...

And so we arrive at the eighth anniversary of “The-Day-Before-Which-The-Thinking-Was-All-Different.” Back when we thought accused wrongdoers should have things like due process, attorneys, charges, trials… before we decided to lock them up and throw away the key. Back when we might have “trusted our government” to bring us goodies like health care, but probably wouldn’t accept “trust us” when it came to reading our mail and e-mail, listening to our phone calls, and reserving the right to “preventively detain” any of us for, you know, “our own safety.” Regular readers know that on “the day” I happened to be at...