Our friends at Media Matters for America nail it with their take on the sudden media feeding frenzy of baseless attempts to tie Pres.-elect Obama to some wrongdoing in the current Gov. Blagojevich scandal. In short, after eight years of pretty much ignoring official malfeasance and private corruption at a level so obscene that it has brought our nation’s financial and moral standing to their breaking points, the (as always subservient to their corporate masters) media has reverted to its beloved story-line of “the Democrats must have done something wrong… because, well they must have“. We’ll overlook the seemingly obvious...

The (domestic) auto industry has clearly been investing in stupid things over the years, such as lobbyists to insist on not raising the auto fleet mileage averages (so-called “CAFE” standards) which would have, over the course of time, resulted in our nation being virtually free of the need to import foreign oil by now… instead, electing to go the opposite way so they could sell more SUVs. They could have instead used their once considerable clout to lobby for socialized medicine national single-payer health care and improved pensions, to relieve them of those crushing obligations. They could have made vehicles...

Are we talking about Henry II “musing” out loud directly resulting the assassination of Archbishop Thomas Beckett… ? Or are we talking about former SecDef Rumsfeld (interviewed here (!)]… who is now the subject of a “better late than never” (no, actually, IMHO, better never than late… because this sort of thing allows members of Congress the pretense of misrepresenting that they are anything other than a bunch of self-serving corporate-teat-sucking whores with less courage than the average coward)… Where was I… oh yes… the Senate Armed Services Committee issued a report blaming detainee abuses on Rumsfeld. Holy crap! YOU...

How many times are we going to have to see that overbearing show-boating prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald bear down on a probably innocent person for some technicality? He did it with Martha Stewart while in New York’s United States Attorney’s office. He did it with that nice Scooter Libby (the President had to correct his overbearingness and commute Scooter’s sentence, and probably pardon Scooter outright in a few weeks) and now, he does it with that nice Governor Rod Blagojevich (Crook-IL). Near as I can tell, Blagojevich’s “crime” was the excessive use of salty language. But I’m sorry: if you can’t...

And so the Soviet show trials Guantanamo military commissions proceed, with their buttoned-down motto being “expect the unexpected”… after the Pentagon went through the trouble of lotterying off seats for families of 9-11 victims at the show trial commission hearing of KSM and a total of 5 of the alleged masterminds of the 9-11 attacks, Khalid Sheik Mohammad and the other defendants offered to plead guilty. KSM and the others are isolated from all the other prisoners, but despite being so bad that he and some others were admittedly waterboarded (the only actual acknowledged torture committed by the United States),...

That would be the Sam Zell owned (via leveraged buy-out) Tribune Company, owner of the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, which amidst the rapid decline in advertising revenue caused by the current Depression economic recession along with the high debt payments resulting from the leveraged buy-out, has hired legal and investment banking advisors to consider a possible bankruptcy filing. Query when the Trib Co. will send its executives to Washington in their corporate jets to ask Congress for a bailout of its own… ? The dead-tree newspaper business has been under assault for years now from the internet;...

Many states have laws providing remedies for customers who purchase chronically bad vehicles, known colloquially as “lemons”. What can one say to the American taxpayer, after nervous lawmakers got together to give away $15 billion more of China’s American taxpayer’s money in an apparent auto-maker bailout deal… buying not merely clunker cars, but clunker car companies? I’ve got your auto bailout right here, America. Fuggedabout the $25 billion asked for; the federal government will pay twice that– $50 billion– immediately secured by the outstanding shares of all three automobile makers; in return, the auto makers will obtain long term contracts...

The Supreme Court granted certiorari review in the case of Ali al-Marri, after Padilla, the second most important case of our lives. Why? Mr. al-Marri, you will recall from our interview with his attorney Jonathan Hafetz, was a legal resident studying at Bradley University in Peoria, IL, when, just like Padilla, was already in the criminal justice system when he was magically declared “an enemy combatant” and held in camera in a military brig in South Carolina, denied any semblance of legal or human rights, and, under every known legal definition of the word, tortured, whether or not a rack...

With only 47 months to go until the November 2012 election, Barack Obama is kicking ass in the polls. Having not elected to waste his precious bodily fluids political capital to help Jim Martin in his quixotic quest to defeat the all powerful Saxby Chambliss in the Georgia Senate race, he instead is scouring an old rolodex he found while touring the White House recently to find members of the Clinton Administration that he hasn’t already appointed. Let me make this clear, folks: Barack is a conventional politician who happens to have had a Black father (a rather kickass Black...

And so this long neglected segment makes its triumphant return with a look at a different kind of talking dog (specifically, the conceit that different species of animals can talk to each other, but not to people), that would be Disney’s latest computer-animated blockbuster, “Bolt,” which Mrs. TD, Loquacious Pup and I saw as family fare. [While I won’t totally spoil it, I may say too much for those who are planning to see it, so… be advised!] Mrs. TD provided me with a spot-on analysis of this film that reflects a level of deep-thinking so subtle that the film-makers...