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...

My heart goes out to the people of Mumbai, India, who have endured days of an ongoing and vicious terror attack that has already killed over 100 and wounded hundreds and hundreds, and does not appear to be over. And as if the attackers wanted us to know they had some Islamist tie-in, they managed to find and attack some of the only 30,000 or so Jews in a country of over 1.3 billion people (at least five of the dead were Israeli citizens, murdered at a Jewish community center during a raid by Indian commandos), and the attack seemed...

The Grey Lady issues a lead editorial calling for the United States Supreme Court to take review of the Ali Al Marri case; Mr. Al Marri, you will recall from, inter alia, our interview with his attorney Jonathan Hafetz, was a lawful resident of the United States who was picked up at his home in Peoria on criminal charges, and like Jose Padilla, magically declared an “enemy combatant” and whisked off the very same brig in Charleston, SC where Padilla languished. As noted in our interview with Jonathan Hafetz, the issues and stakes are the same: it matters not under...

That would be, perhaps, Daniel Gross writing at Slate, that it is not time to party like it’s 1929, because it isn’t 1929. Many of the institutions that exist now (as a result of the Great Depression), such as FDIC and Social Security, serve as ultimate economic shock absorbers, and further, unlike the 30’s, when in one year alone over 4,000 banks failed, things are bad, but not like that. (Mr. Gross fails to mention the perennial economic demand machine known as “the military industrial complex,” so I will, though of course, spending on the refurbishment of the bridge of...

In an unexpected (to me, anyway) ruling, Judge Richard Leon of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. ordered the release of 5 (out of 6 litigating) Bosnian/Algerian detainees now held at Guantanamo Bay, granting their habeas corpus petitions. Judge Leon is actually the second judge to order detainees released. Judge Ricardo Urbina previously granted an ostensibly uncontested petition by a group of Chinese nationals who the government conceded were “not enemy combatants,” just that they had no rights anyway, and the government got a stay from an appellate court. [The plight of the Uighurs is discussed in my interview...

No, not… her. When it comes to the real choices, and not those touted by Team Clinton to keep itself relevant and pushed by the media trying to keep hopping in a naturally slow post-election news month, the real announcements from Team Obama are made in a grown-up, non-dysfunctional, and non-drama-queen way. And so it is with the Secretary of Health and Human Services designate, former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. Not dissimilar to his earlier choice of former Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder to serve as the next United States Attorney General. No need for press recriminations… No need...