It seems the Senate isn’t having the President’s arbitrary healthcare bill deadline of August 7th (Barack’s birthday is August 4th, for those keeping track, whether in Hawaii or Kenya or Mars…) Anyway… when your opening message is “We’re going to reduce your coverage, increase your costs, and mess with something 85% of you have and are generally satisfied with… and still manage not to insure millions of people”… it comes as no surprise that when a majority of people favor single-payer health care … and its not even part of the first offer… you’ll end up with a wholly unsatisfactory...

This WaPo op ed by former NASA Administrator Michael Griffin observes that while we went to the moon 40 years ago (today), we couldn’t do it again… largely, because we dismantled the implements of the lunar landing program. Griffin suggests its because of the loss of “the vision thing.” I think it’s much more serious than that. I think we’re now largely a nation of actual-underachieving-children, maniacally good at little else besides playing with our asininely complex toys and padding our resumes (17-year olds now generally must have published novels, perfect SATs and grade point averages, multiple varsity letters and...

Longtime CBS news anchor, “most trusted man in America” and former TD East 50’s neighbor Walter Cronkite passed away at 92. Cronkite himself was unabashedly liberal, but as a newscaster (and news selector), his concern wasn’t about “objectivity” (though his was rarely questioned… see above re “most trusted man in America”), so much as getting the story… and getting the story right. I don’t know what Cronkite actually thought of what passes for “journalism” these days, such as the talking-head partisan shouters, or the vapid babbling of conventional wisdom, or of course, the printing of “both sides” press releases to...

Somehow I’ve gotten onto the mailing list of the American Bar Association… perhaps they’ve figured out that I have a license to kill steal practice law, after all these years (22? 23? my freaking GOD!). Anyway… the ABA Journal sends this little snippet from the most overrated corporate executive in the history of the world, former GE CEO Jack Welch, who tells us… wait for it… chicks who take time off for their kids (I suppose this would include giving birth to them) put their careers in grave peril, by not bein’ around ALL THE TIME to do the boss-man’s...

Our friend Rob Farley tells us in this in this Foreign Policy piece, “How I stopped worrying and learned to love put up with Iran having the bomb.” Rob’s message: calm the f*** down. While Iran is led by people who say the darndest bat sh*t things (and who dress funny)… so was China in the late 50’s, and indeed, China was, in many ways, far more worrisome than Iran… and yet… has been deterrable. I have said similar things: Ahmadinedjad, though a crazy, Holocaust-denying firebrand a**hole… ain’t running Iran. He is part of a front-operation for a group of...

No, I’m not talking about right-wing punditry, but in a long overdue visit to our friends at Pravda, this brief piece on last week’s cyber-attacks on key governmental websites in South Korea and the United States [ attacks which seem to be ongoing… possibly attributable to forces in… North Korea… ] While the Pravda discussion is a tad superficial (translation issues may be in play), the point is well-taken: we are in an era when it will get ever easier to impose potentially catastrophic damage on others remotely, without even having to get one’s hands dirty with a “traditional” WMD…...

To CNN’s credit, after its early failures to adequately cover the fluid, massive protests in Iran following that nation’s recent election in which controversial President Mahmoud Ahmadinedjad was reelected in an extremely controversial, widely believed to be rigged and illegitimate vote count, it seems to have gotten the message. So, while it’s unfortunate that the story is the Iranian government cracking down on a protest rally with its usual brutality on the tenth anniversary of a massive student protest ten years ago (back when Iran had its reformist President Khatami), I’m glad to see CNN covering it. One might think...

If you had told me two years ago that my college classmate, then Sen. Barack Obama would find himself the President of the United States by 2009, assuming that I didn’t think you were insane, I would probably have just laughed my a** off, and left it at that. But… if you would have told me one year ago that President Barack Obama (having sewed up the Dem. nomination by then, his ascendancy to the Presidency became substantially more likely) would not only block so much as investigation of the misdeeds of his predecessor and his minions, but that Obama...

Charles Gittings is the progenitor of the Project to Enforce the Geneva Conventions, a web-site compiling “torture memos” and other evidence of governmental criminality during the so-called “War on Terror,” as well as court papers, amicus briefs and other relevant documents. On July 2, 2009, I had the privilege of interviewing Mr. Gittings by e-mail exchange. The Talking Dog: Where were you on 9-11? Charles Gittings: I was at the MacArthur BART Station in Oakland, California, waiting for the train to my job in Hayward. I was standing by myself towards the end of the platform reflecting on the anniversary...

It seemed like it was going on the length of “the Al Franken decade”… but the Minnesota Senate race is finally over, and soon-to-be Senator Al Franken is absolutely delighted with his win in the Minnesota Supreme Court of the never-ending election contest. Best of luck to Sen. Franken, perhaps the only “celebrity I have met while blogging,” whose quip when he began his long campaign was that he was the only New York Jew in the Minnesota Senate race who grew up in Minnesota! This event gives the Democrats the (we’re told) somehow magical total of 60 (counting Specter...