The President addressed a joint session of Congress and gave his remarks concerning the budget he will be presenting shortly. Not sure what to think of this one; it seemed disjointed, especially from a rhetorical master like President Obama. This could be the nature of the current crisis. Still, it might have been more “confidence building” if more specifics ($__billion to re-build roads, $___ billion to ensure that schools are adequately funded, etc.) made there way in there (there were some specifics, like $15 billion a year in energy research)… but the stimulus bill was one of the biggest progressive...

After seven years of some of the most horrifying torture I have ever heard of (besides the usual beating, sleep deprivation, starvation and so forth, Binyam was treated to years in cold dark rooms while his “interrogations’ included repeatedly slicing open his penis in a Moroccan dungeon) at the behest of the United States government (or at other times, committed by the CIA or American military torturers interrogators…) British resident/Ethiopian national Binyam Mohamed has finally been released from Guantanamo Bay and is now home in Britain. Binyam had issued a statement calling the treatment he received “Medieval”. That’s…. pretty euphemistic...

To TD Mom… who turns an amazingly youthful three-score and ten today…

It’s not particularly hard to draw one’s own conclusions re: the kerfuffle surrounding one little iddy biddy editorial cartoon in Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post. I mean, sure, it appears to simultaneously (1) depict the first Black President of the United States as a monkey (2) who has just been executed by the police… and it has the adorable caption “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.” I suppose, thirty days after the inauguration of our nation’s first Black President, that this particular cartoon appearing in an arch-right-wing paper might be interpreted to mean something...

Recent TD interview subject Almerindo Ojeda of the Guantanamo Testimonials Project hits it out of the park with his own interview of former GTMO prison guard Army Specialist Brandon Neely. In the interview, Neely describes the sundry experiences of a prison guard in the very early days of Camp X-Ray, Guantanamo Bay, including his observation of (and occasional participation in) the various abuses heaped upon the hapless prisoners, observations of disrespect of the Koran and the detainees’ religious practices, a number of acts of kindness, and an amazing catalogue of the experiences of a young, inadequately trained soldier placed by...

We start with new Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele telling Glenn Beck that there is just no reason for anyone to trust anything that the Republican Party now says. Then, we’ll throw in Sen. Arlen Specter (R as in Running for Reelection – PA) and his observation that Republicans like the stimulus package just fine (after all, it has hundreds of billions of irresponsible tax cuts, and the most-actually- stimulative parts were surgically removed)… it’s just that they don’t want their own fingerprints on it. This, at least, is consistent with the final passage of the bill in which...

As I frequently allude to, we live in amazingly self-absorbed times. How self-absorbed? Well, sometime today this humble blog will reach it’s 500,000th site-view… no… where was I… Oh yes… Today, while we should celebrate the simultaneous bicentennials (today, people!) of the births of Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln, both pictured above, this event is pretty much by and large ignored. To be fair to our current President, he’s been in office 23 days now; this sort of thing would have been the responsibility of his predecessor. Well, we can certainly see why the Bush Administration wouldn’t have spent any...

Well, for the good news… the President seems to be confidently taking his model of organizing from outside Washington to take on politics inside the Beltway, both in his earlier town hall meeting in Elkhart, IN, and later at his prime time press conference; Al Giordano covers the field, in order to advance the economic stimulus package. During that press conference, besides reinviting Helen Thomas into the fold of Presidential questioners, the President called on Sam Stein of the Huffington Post. Stein asked the President “the question”: whether he would investigate, and if appropriate, prosecute, his predecessor’s administration for war...

And so it seems, Nobel Laureate and Grey Lady columnist Paul Krugman isn’t happy with how the stimulus bill has gone down. He believes that President Obama’s post-partisan claptrap (which has resulted in flipping exactly zero Republican House members and a princely three Republican Senators) to openly support the stimulus plan has been counterproductive, and results in a weaker bill that foolishly benefits the affluent and fails to benefit those who most need the additional government support… all while falling well short of “the stimulus” actually needed. To which I say, Professor Krugman has the viewpoint exactly backwards in order...

It was a matter of time, I suppose, before we were going to learn that baseball’s Alex “A-Rod” Rodriguez tested positive for steroids. The highest paid player in the game, A-Rod has usually represented “addition by subtraction” for whatever team he left, and instant also-ran status to whatever team he joined, despite being, statistically, one of the greatest players in the history of the game. While it would have been no dishonor to have won no World Series rings with the perennial also-ran Seattle Mariners or the perennial not-very-good-at-all Texas Rangers, for a not insubstantial period of time, A-Rod has...