Is the health and well-being of people you care about. We wish godspeed and a speedy recovery to our friend Teresa Nielsen Hayden.

And so talks continue in the shadow of Ground Zero over at the New York Federal Reserve Bank over the fate of beleaguered financial giant Lehman Brothers. Apparently, the taxpayer-backstopped interventions to deal with Bear Sterns and of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae have wiped out the U.S. Treasury’s reserves to do similar deals involving taxpayer money (solution: lower taxes for the rich… more), and so the leading proposals involve a break-up, and a disposal of Lehman’s “bad” assets to a consortium of banks, who would themselves absorb the risk. Needless to say, some of those banks are balking, and...

Any decent sailor will tell you that a key way to get to where you’re going (not to mention to avoid seasickness) is to focus on a point on the horizon, and keep heading for it–not to be thrown off course by the wind, or the waves, or other distractions… just as Al Giordano keeps telling us to banish “chicken littles” who keep insisting the electoral sky is falling. This piece is a case in point of why I check his site at least daily: Al knows what the f*** he is talking about. Let me summarize: Sarah Palin? Distraction....

Well, if you’re Dick Cheney, that is. And Rudy 91uliani has an entire second career because of today. For those roughly 95, 96% of Americans who don’t live in a city targeted on 11 Sept. 2001, and the roughly 85-90% of Americans who don’t live in a city likely to be targeted at all, we who live in those cities that were say “get the f*** over it already; God knows we have.” We have greater reason to fear the loss of loved ones from more mundane homicides… or illnesses… or accidents… than we do now, or ever really have,...

Oddly enough, I am not referring to “pig gate,” that asinine flap (or is it a kerfuffle?) developing between the two battling political camps over Barack’s remark about the McCain program being “putting lipstick on a pig”… the Democrat apparently failing to recognize that Governor Sarah Palin using her stupidmean-spirited adorable joke noting that the difference between a soccersecurity hockey mom and a pitbull was lipstick imbued the Republican Party with an all-time trademark on the word lipstick and its use in any subsequent joke, which will instantly be called a sexist attack on that nice young perty Governor Palin...

On Saturday afternoon, I was driving down Atlantic Avenue, and turned onto Adams Street in downtown Brooklyn, intending to drive over the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan to pick up Mrs. TD. It became quite clear traffic wasn’t moving at all because Adams Street had been taped off by the police. I turned around and found an alternate route, grumbling about it. Today, to my horror, I learned why the street was blocked, and it had nothing to do with the tropical storm rolling on in. Instead, it concerned a special kind of tragedy: an 8-year old boy on a bicycle...

That S&G title sounds almost like a message right out of Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas?, or the usual conundrum of how the interests of the rich and powerful, as embodied by their temporal representative on Earth, the Republican Party, are sold to the working stiffs of America who, though not forming a majority of the electorate, form a sufficiently strong plurality to keep voting for a party that has the interests of the few at heart… Of course, it might also be a reminder to those wishing well to the Obama-Biden ticket to stop wasting time with...

Senator John McCain accepted the Republican party’s nomination this evening, delivering a speech almost entirely out of place among Republicans for its near total lack of pettiness and hate and its expressing actual humility, making all of us wonder, once again, which side might ultimately receive the inevitable “pay-back” that will be the defining sentiment of any potential John McCain Administration should such come to pass. Governor Palin’s speech last night, written as it was by Rove’s political team for any generic vice-presidential candidate, contained the usual red-meat falsehoods, hatred and incoherence we’ve come to expect from Republicans of the...

Another day, another Sarah Palin scandalette… today: Governor Palin attended a church service where David Brickner, the founder of “Jews for Jesus,” a group that Jews certainly regard as at a minimum crackpot (some believe it is a hate-group) was the guest speaker, and during his talk, he suggested that Israeli Jews were suffering from Palestinian terrorist attacks in punishment for their failure to accept Jesus as their savior. For those wondering, the time frame is around two weeks ago, during the period, one would think, that she was being vetted for consideration for the vice-presidential nomination. Most people won’t...

Another day, another Sarah Palin related scandal, today evidently the good old National Enquirer‘s reporting that Palin had an affair with her husband’s business partner. All of this is, of course, infinitely more important than, say, the break-off of the giant Markham ice shelf in Northern Canada (around the size of Manhattan)… probably as a result of human-caused climate change, which Sen. McCain used to believe in until he secured his party’s nomination. None of this, of course, is as important as Sarah P.’s (1) unwed teenage daughter, and (2) possible own affair. BTW, there is relevance to this in...