Sentencing themselves to political death (in service of the all-important insurance industry), the House Republicans voted to sustain the President’s veto of a bill expanding the popular “S-CHIP” health insurance program for children, with a veto override failing by just 13 votes. Congratulations to the Republicans, having generated record deficits through massive tax cuts in favor of those who can most afford to pay taxes, to have had the fiscal discipline to try to restore some semblance of budget sanity on the backs of children, and their health! Way to go! This seems to confirm my view that the GOP...

Notwithstanding that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences liked him enough to award him an Oscar, and now, the Norwegian committee charged with the prize has awarded former Vice-President Al Gore the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in publicizing the dangers of climate change, the American press corps will still tell us that Gore is stiff, wooden and boring, sighs too much, and of course (wait for it…) he’s fat. Let’s face it… notwithstanding that he is a happily married man (and a decent man) who would never dream of such a thing, with an Oscar and...

This is more or less the conclusion reached by the Supreme Court of the United States in denying review of lower courts’ refusals to hear a case against the CIA brought by the ACLU on behalf of Khalid al-Masri, a German national mistakenly abducted and tortured for months by the CIA as part of its charming “extraordinary rendition” program, on the basis of the United States’ assertion of “state secrets”. Ben Wizner, the ACLU attorney speaking to the press, notes that the “state secret” involved is, of course, hardly “a secret” at all, to wit, that the United States kidnaps...

The traditional celebration of European success through superior fire-power and lack of native germ resistance Columbus Day, of which this would be the 515th anniversary, believed to be the day that Columbus’s mini-armada landed in the Bahamas, took place on the 12th of October, before our last liberal President (Nixon) started to make every holiday save the three confined to their calendar days (1 January, 4 July and 25 December) a Monday holiday (as a liberal, Nixon liked the idea of giving the workers some contiguous time off, which stimulated tourism to boot!). I spent part of my own Columbus...

Thus is the logic of the current round of Presidential denials that the United States of torturers America… engages in torture (after a whole new round of secret torture memos was just unearthed) [h/t to Candace.]. Because waterboarding, or starving people, or subjecting them to freezing temperatures or loud noises or sleep deprivation or all of this at the same time while holding them in solitary confinement for years, or anything else that everyone else in the world universally regards as torture… isn’t torture, because a conscienceless political whore with a law degree says it isn’t, so it isn’t. This...

What else can you say about the sudden resurgence of the once anemic Hillary fundraising machine, which has caught up with solid debate performances and not-ready-for-primetime party opponents… giving Hillary a lead in quarterly fundraising and a 33% poll lead over Obama. The Scaife-Wallace-Murdoch media machine (and, btw, Murdoch personally seems to like former Walmart board member Hillary Clinton) now has its knives out for Hillary (hence the perverse obsession with her clothing and cleavage). OTOH, it also looks like a lot of their steam is gone– they might well be willing to concede 2008. Why else would they mau...

My friend Candace (she’s interviewed here) reports that the Supreme Court of the United States has accepted her original petition for habeas corpus on behalf of her client Abdul Hamid Al-Ghizzawi; the petition itself may be found here. Candace was nice enough to let me make some editorial suggestions with respect to this petition, some of which actually made it in there; hence, I take more than a rooting interest in this particular case. We’ve been in legal never-never land for so long that it’s often hard to remember those naiive days when many of us actually believed that the...

Today marks 16 years of happily wedded bliss for Mrs. TD and I (though some in the Bush Administration question the validity of our marriage based on its venue of origin). And a hearty Mazel Tov and happy B’nai Mitzvot to TD Niece and Nephew.

In “Operation Deja Vu All Over Again”, misguided American forces mistakenly believed that the no longer relevant (if they ever were) Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahiri (didn’t we get him back in Iraq?) were having a big pre-Ramadan Qaeda-con-fab at… wait for it… the Tora Bora caves in Afghanistan. Unbelievably, our military ordered an attack! Fortunately, the misguided plan to remove the number one excuse for why we are in Iraq (and let’s face it, as Rush would say, any service member who questions our mission or particularly wishes it to ever end is a “phony soldier”– and probably...

I was actually kind of proud of dear old alma mater for having more cojones than Mike Bloomberg (himself a Hopkins grad and Hahvahd MBA); the Lord Mayor decided to invoke bullsh*t “security concerns” to deny Iranian wildman president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad an opportunity to lay a wreath at Ground Zero… I mean, let’s face it… the last thing this country, or this city needs, is even the remote possibility of coming to understanding and reconciliation with people we disagree with, especially when our political overlords and the punditocracy need bogeymen. I guess we saw how well that sort of thing...