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...

The Grey Lady reports that the Senate Democrats (yes those Senate Democrats) may have realized that, in fact, they don’t need 60 votes to pass anything, given that Joe Biden is the Vice-President and Minnesota still hasn’t seated a Senator, 50 votes will be just fine… and so, it seems, they are prepared to go forth and pass the President’s economic stimulus package, the Republicans and their quite-literally-enemies-of-the-people obstructionism be damned. And, Al Giordano, the man with his ear to the pulse of organizing (as led by our community organizer President), lays out how the President is, of course, organizing...

With a huge majority in both houses, notwithstanding the near “filibuster proof” majority… it appears that the “economic recovery” or “stimulus” package of $900,000,000,000 (yes, that’s $900 billion) in additional deficit spending lacks the votes to pass in the Senate, at least in its current form. It would appear that the problem, as we always knew it would, comes from wavering Democrats who aren’t backing the President, as its not a filibuster threat that’s the rub here, but good old “blue dog” Democrats. Thing is, the “stimulus” is in fact, a big-time progressive initiative finally providing adequate funding to education...

Jeh Johnson is the new General Counsel of the United States Department of Defense. Today, Candace published an open letter to Mr. Johnson in the Huffington Post. With apologies for harkening back to a metaphor used by the Bush Administration, Candace lays out a roadmap for one of Mr. Johnson’s signal tasks as DOD GC: closing Guantanamo. Candace’s letter, in its entirety: