Exxon Mobil will have to pay its professional U.F.O. observersHolocaust deniers global warming skeptics a wee-bit more cold hard cash to get them to insist that the world isn’t getting un-colder… particuarly as new evidence of temperature/climate observations in Antarctica, held out by said professional skeptics as “evidence” that their paid positions were somehow justified by actual data… shows, in fact, that Antarctica is warming (because of human activity) just like the rest of the planet. Again, human activity has certainly been exacerbating this problem for a long, long time, and certainly, it is unreasonable to suggest that the entire...

Although no explicit mention of Guantanamo was made in President Obama’s most excellent inauguration address, it does seem that The President (!) is putting his money where his mouth is, as in his very first 24 hours in office, he has directed prosecutors at GTMO to move to stay all prosecutions for 120 days, while the new Obama Administration ascertains how it wishes to proceed from here. [And National Palestine Radio (NPR)! reports that a GTMO judge has granted that request, seconds ago, just before 0900.] I have my own thoughts, of course, on what to do with the GTMO...

It’s finally January 20, 2009; while we’re all excited as hell to have Barack Obama, our first African American (and TD’s first college classmate) to be inaugurated as President… even more exciting is the cessation of pain… pain in the form of the Bush Administration, coming to an end in a little over three hours. Interestingly, like Darth Vader before him, it seems the President has little to offer for his minions; at least so far, those pardons for torture for such denizens as Rumsfeld, Cheney, Tenet, etc…. just ain’t coming. To quote a character from (IIRC) Unforgiven, “Day Ain’t...

Times, they are a changin’. My own feelings on this sui generis day, when on a day commemmorating the 80th birthday (plus four days or so) of the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., coming as it does the day before the inauguration of our first African American President, Barack Hussein Obama (and yes, he’ll be using all three names) are… sui generis. In fact, I find it hard to characterize them… I am excited, to be sure… I expressed my support for Mr. Obama on this blog fairly early on (albeit still in calendar ’08), but certainly while it...

It seems there is a consensus among the living: George W. Bush is the worst President in the history of polling, leaving office with a miserable 22% approval rating. His trusted sidekick, Richard Bruce Cheney, Vice President for Torture, leaves office with an even more astounding 13%. As a natural contrarian, I tend to think that most people have things wrong most of the time; indeed, ’twere it not otherwise, everyone would have invested in the right stocks, bet on the right horse, made the right career decisions, and so forth… or voted for the right candidate. As you know,...

Faith in the miraculous (whether or not one accepts the premise of some “higher being” responsible) was rewarded today in my fair city when, just a few miles from my office (downtown, conveniently nestled between Ground Zero and the Stock Exchange) a U.S. Airways jet bound for Charlotte crash-landed in the Hudson River… and all 155 people on board survived. Obviously, the events of the last seven years (culminating in the degrading, possibly irreparably, of our economy, our military, our standing in the world, our Constitutional protections and our environment largely because the Bush Administration was reelected in 2004) were...

And so it continues… the heroic Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld of the Army Reserve [seventh GTMO prosecutor to resign!] submitted an affidavit in federal court challenging proceedings against GTMO detainee Mohammed Jawad, in which Vandeveld asserts that the evidence against GTMO kangaroo court military commission defendants is in a state of complete chaos. Videotapes of confessions are missing, written confessions for illiterate men are written in languages the men don’t speak (let alone read!), and of course, many of the statements were made under coercion, or outright torture, often at the hands of the Afghans or others who turned them...

First, we’ll start with this news from Candace, to wit, the United States Supreme Court, just as it accepted (though ultimately denied) an original habeas corpus petition on behalf of her client Abdul al-Ghizzawi, now has ordered the government to respond to Candace’s petition for certiorari review, a petition to which Candace was kind enough to let me make some suggestions. The current petition seeks the Supreme Court’s intervention to compel the Government to turn over al-Ghizzawi’s medical records so that an independent medical evaluation may be made, a request that the Bush Administration has vehemently resisted (and the lower...

Jacob Weisberg gives us a Slate piece that tries to ask the meta-question not so much about how catastrophic Bush’s mistakes in office were… but about how the mistakes were made. As Weisberg notes, right now, it’s virtually impossible to name so much as a single area in which Bush left things better than he found them, capped with the triple threat of disasters looming: a bogged down war in Iraq, a world-wide so-called “war on terror” that has debased our standing in the world and yet still managed not to capture one guy, and fiscal mismanagement of a scale...

Regardless of what else happens anywhere else on Earth, even in the same generalized region of the Middle East (where no less a figure than the former Iraqi PM Iyad Allawi, that great savior of American military-imposed democracy as the man first installed before Nouri al-Maliki was eventually tapped, termed Bush and his policy toward Iraq complete failures)… little ever seems to change viz the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Currently, Israel has just commenced a ground offensive into Gaza, after a week of aerial bombardments. The results will inevitably be significant casualties to Hamas and to Gazan civilians, and there will almost...